Women's three-piece suit in Tang Dynasty: skirt, blouse and purse.
Fan Bingbing's "The Legend of Wu Mei Niang" was released on the big screen, and the topless dress worn by women in the film caused public controversy. How did women in the Tang Dynasty dress? Is it really so open?
An ancient costume researcher told reporters: "The basic dress of women's clothing in the Tang Dynasty is a three-piece suit: skirt, blouse and blouse. The clothes of the protagonist in Wu Meiniang's legend "have nothing to do with the Tang Dynasty, only the clothes of ladies-in-waiting, with a little shadow of the clothes of the Tang Dynasty". In addition, in the early Tang Dynasty, the costumes were relatively compact and the image was slim. In the middle and late Tang Dynasty, it began to develop into a plump and generous style. "
Ji Sun, an archaeologist, mentioned in "Women's Dress and Makeup in Tang Dynasty" that women's clothing was relatively compact in the early Tang Dynasty (Figure 1 and 2), and after the prosperous Tang Dynasty (Figures 3 and 4), the middle Tang Dynasty (Figure 5) and the late Tang Dynasty (Figures 6 and 7), dresses, sleeves and skirts tended to be hypertrophy.
So, is there any evidence to test the three-piece suit of women's dress, blouse and purse in Tang Dynasty? In many historical and novel works of the Tang Dynasty, there are records of women's costumes in the Tang Dynasty.
In the Tang Dynasty, Niu Monk-ru recorded the clothes of a civilian woman: "A child was holding a box with an old green skirt, a white shirt and a green wallet inside". There is also a story in "Fairy Tales Lao Xu Man", saying that a wife of Cao Liu, a scholar in Yizhou in Tang Dynasty, "Huang Luo's silver mud skirt, five dizzy silver mud shirts, and a single Di Yin mud purse are also great clothes for the capital." Archaeologist Mr. Ji Sun wrote in the article "Women's Clothing and Makeup in Tang Dynasty" that "skirts, shirts and pockets are the three major elements of women's clothing in Tang Dynasty, and these three basic elements are indispensable regardless of their status, wealth and dignity."
"Shirt" is a long-sleeved blouse worn by women in the Tang Dynasty, with narrow sleeves and short body. In all kinds of documents in the Tang Dynasty, when it comes to everyday women's wear, tops are often referred to as "shirts" and "shirts", such as "lotus-root silk shirts and willow-flowered skirts", "red shirts wrapped with small arms" and "sweet shirts with narrow sleeves cut on them". A large number of pawning and redemption records of ordinary people are recorded in the Tang Dynasty treasury calendar unearthed from No.206 tomb in Astana, Turpan, Xinjiang, almost all of which are "shirts". Shirts generally refer to single clothes, but in winter, they are changed to double clothes, also called "double shirts".
In addition, the shirt sleeves in the early Tang Dynasty were narrow, and there was often a description of "red sleeves wrapped in narrow arms" in poetry, while the shirts in the middle and late Tang Dynasty were slightly loose. The collar styles of shirts are more diverse. According to the records of pottery figurines, murals and other cultural relics, there are many forms such as straight collar, horizontal collar, round neck and oblique collar.
It is worth noting that the situation of half-exposed breasts and low neckline, which is often set in TV dramas, did not appear in the early Tang Dynasty. Before and after the beginning of Kaiyuan in Wu Zhou Dynasty, the neckline of shirts was low, and some pictures of "pink shirts covering crisp breasts" appeared. In addition, dresses with crisp breasts and half dew are generally only worn on certain occasions, such as the court and boudoir.