This weekend at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is your last chance to see some gorgeous examples of Chinese and Chinese American fashion, “Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity.” This exhibit features fashion from the 1930s to the 1960s with specially designed mannequins to show off each era.
The “empire” in the title is the Qing Dynasty, China’s last imperial dynasty, which began in 1644 and lasted until 1912. Founded by the Manchu ethnic group who were from the northeast part of China (as opposed to the Han majority), it expanded to triple its size. At its peak, it was known for its beautiful porcelain, jade carvings, traditional paintings and novels like “Dream of the Red Chamber.” It also saw t he rise of the Peking Opera. The Manchus united tribes north of the Great Wall and as the Mind Dynasty weakened under internal strife, the Ming officials invited the Manchu to help quell the internal strife. Instead, the Manchu seized the capital. Yet the Manchu adopted the Ming government institutions, but enforced Manchu customs (e.g. Chinese mean wearing the queue).
The central part of the exhibit is the gift from Berkeley-based artist and designer Chere Lai Mah who decided in 2020 to donate her collection to LACMA. Lai Mah is the daughter of Li Zhang Hui-fang, and daughter-in-law of Ma Zhang Siu San, from whom the collection started. Yet the collection grew through a network of friends, family and community to include items from Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Singapore, Taiwan. Bangkok, Tokyo, San Francisco and New York City. Ma Zhang Siu San (aka Susan Mah) and Li Zhang Hui-fang, who lived during the radical transformation of China and became part of the Chinese American community in Fresno, California in the late 1930s despite the Chinese Exclusion Act still be enforced. Both women were born during the final years of the Qing dynasty in the Guangdong Province.
Once the deal was set, the museum began collecting examples from Shanghai and Hong to complement the collections strengths as well as fill in the gaps. The LACMA acquisitions included an informal March court gown previously owned by Taiwanese pop star Jeff Shin-Che Chang and Hong Kong Cheongsam from the personal wardrobe of architect I.M. Pei’s stepmother.
The exhibit is arranged by eras and the embroidery, fabrics and ornate details are all worth seeing. If you can’t make if down, Michaela Hansen (with contributions by Mei Mei Rado, Sharon Sadako Takeda and Jason Wu), has written a beautiful hardback catalog book. Jason Wu designed the mannequins, avoiding stereotypical portrayals, attempting to give these 3D printed white mannequins a subtle strength that reflected the diversity and complexity of Chinese women over the decades.
What you won’t get is a sense of how these reflected or complemented the clothing worn by Chinese American men. In traditional China, men also wore colorful garments at court. The emperor wore ornate and colorful gowns and jackets, from the coronation robes (mianfu), to the semi-official robes (longpao) to the formal court attire (chaifu). Did that men really stop being peacocks under the influence of the West?
If you’re interested in fashion and fabric, there’s also a new exhibit that opened last month: “Textile Alchemy: The Art of Reiko Sudo and NUNO.”
“Textile Alchemy: The Art of Reiko Sudō & NUNO” is about the merging of tradition and technology in textiles. Sudō is one of Japan’s most influential contemporary textile e designers. The Ibaraki Prefecture-born Sudō uses tradition Japanese dyeing and weaving techniques but incorporates contemporary engineering techniques and unusual combinations of diverse materials like silk, Japanese paper (washi), thermoplastic, metals and feathers.
Nuno means fabric in Japanese and NUNO is also a company that was first launched in 2002 as a showcase for hand-printed textiles. The exhibit isn’t just samples of fabric, but great bolts of material that hang down like tapestry. If you want more than a look, there’s a small gift shop in the middle with some pricey but beautiful examples of Reiko Sudō textiles. 
“Textile Alchemy” feeds into two other new exhibits: “Home of the Future, 1925-1985: Designing Domestic Utopias” and “The Kitchen and Its Discontents” which runs until 14 March 2027. There are some modern innovations that inspired or were inspired by movies. You might be amused by the predictions made about the modern home or that a toilet is part of an art exhibit. Perhaps somewhere Marcel Duchamp approves although this isn’t presented as a readymade sculpture like the “Fountain” and there’s no clever signature like “R. Mutt.”
“The Kitchen and Its Discontents” reminds us that the kitchen and domestic bliss were too often designed by men for women, but not by women. I love kitchens and cooking but who wants to be domesticated?
“Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity” continues until Sunday, 12 October 2026.
Textile Alchemy: The Art of Reiko Sudo and Nuno,” continues until 7 March 2027. For more tickets and more information, visit LACMA.org.
