Chapter 3 surveys the range of zhifu (‘uniforms’) made and worn in the Mao years, showing that they quickly replaced the long gown as dress for men in urban contexts.Countering claims that there were no official laws or regulations governing dress in China, this chapter argues that protocols governing work dress constituted a regulatory system. The reorganization of the workforce provided an administrative framework within which making and wearing of zhifu was both encouraged and expected. Once major institutions in education, communications and industry were taken over by the new state, it was to be expected that dress for staff would show similarities across the spectrum of workplaces. Once planning prioritized the production of zhifu, its domination of the clothing supply was assured.

Chapter 2 lays the ground for an understanding of what was involved in the transformation of tailoring, identifying key developments in technology, tools and materials. Pre-industrial sewing techniques and tools show much shared terrain between China and Europe. Items such as scissors, needles and measuring rules were essentially similar. Under the impact of cultural and technological change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even these tools were gradually displaced and a range of entirely new items entered the realm of tailoring. Buttons, safety pins, belt hooks and tape measures flowed into the Treaty Ports from suppliers in Germany, Britain and Japan, stimulating new local industries in China. The changed contents of a sewing basket point in the first half of the twentieth century to a large-scale reconfiguration of clothing production under way in these years, ahead of the visible transformation of dress in the Mao years.

Although zhifu is a term more closely associated with men’s wear than with women’s, women’s work in the Mao years did include making zhifu. Chapter Four documents the proliferation of sewing schools for women in the 1950s, showing that they were a route by which women entered the paid workforce. Women in various contexts – in factories, sewing co-ops, and especially in their homes – were significant agents in the production of the new national wardrobe. In much of rural China, women continued to spin the yarn, weave the cloth, and make the clothes and shoes for all the family members. In this way, they reproduced a material culture not too different from that of preceding generations (although not entirely the same, either). In the towns, however, a new material culture was created, much of it at the hands of women.

Chapter 6 makes a case for periodizing the Mao years as the time of the sewing machine and homemade clothing. Before 1949 most sewing machines were imported. After 1949 a sewing-machine industry developed rapidly and within the space of fifteen years there were factories in practically every province. In propaganda, the sewing machine is overshadowed by the gun, the hammer and the sickle. There were no public awards for the heroic task of working the whole night through to clothe the family. It was possible for a woman to be employed in a clothing factory in the day and then to be fully occupied making clothes at night. Personal memoirs and biographical accounts suggest efforts on an extraordinary scale by individual women in providing clothes for family members and neighbours. They made for love, for necessity, for social advantage and for money. For people who grew up in those decades, the sound of the sewing machine is a clear childhood memory, inextricably linked with memories of the clothes their mothers made them.

Pattern books provided guidelines for how to make garments. Chapter 8 explores approaches to the problem posed by physical intimacy between the normatively male tailor and a female client in a social and political climate characterized by avoidance of sex. Drawing the body in this environment was necessary to providing instructions but presented graphic artists with a huge challenge. A comparison of lessons in ‘how to take a measurement’ in the Mao years shows that this challenge sometimes proved too much. During the Cultural Revolution, images of women were occasionally omitted from pattern books altogether. Under these circumstances, the zhifu had virtually no competition.

As a single-party state, Communist China had a precedent in Nationalist China. As a vestimentary regime the party state of the People’s Republic of China shared important features with its predecessor, most noticeably the cadre suit. The shared human resources of the two party states included the Red Group tailors, masters of Western tailoring in the former Treaty Ports, especially in Shanghai. The story of the Zhongshan suit takes various forms but most involve the Red Group. Chapter 1 relates their story, important in Chinese history not only because of this hagiographical element but also because of the manifest significance of the group as agents in the transformation of tailoring techniques. In a historical context characterized by often sharp oppositions between West and East, China and Japan, and Nationalists and Communists, the history of the Red Group shows the links between the Western suit and the Zhongshan suit, tailoring techniques in Japan and China, and dress practices in the Nationalist and Communist eras respectively.

The conclusion reviews the period and themes covered in the book. Different kinds of time played out in different sectors. Clothing reflects this temporal and spatial diversity. Viewed from the perspective of what people wore, however, this was the time of the Mao suit, or at least of the zhifu. Not everyone wore one; there were periods of light and shade in the intensity of dress conformity; there were differences between town and country, between male and female, even between decades. Throughout this period, however, zhifu had hegemonic status. In 1983, even as the Western suit was surging back into fashion, the Zhongshan suit was promoted as the ‘representative garment’ of men’s clothing in China, a garment that encapsulated national feeling, expressed the style of the Chinese people, and was also admired and loved by them.