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Fashion and Textiles Gallery
Gallery
Fashion and Textiles

The Fashion and Textiles gallery presents a diverse range of fashion and textiles through periodically-rotating displays, outlining how identities and cross-cultural exchanges are revealed through dress.

Fashion and Textiles Gallery
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Permanent

Admission

Free for Singaporeans & PRs. Ticketing charges for tourists apply.

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Getting here

5 min walk from Raffles Place MRT Station

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Fashion and Textiles Gallery
Gallery Overview

Fashion and Textiles


This gallery explores Asian histories, cultures, and identities through fashion and textiles. In their choice of what to wear, people reveal their ideas about religion, class, status, gender – and personal taste. Going beyond national dress, it shows how styles commonly associated with one region often incorporate styles from another.


In Asian port cities, the movements of people, exchanges of goods, spread of ideologies, impact of colonialism, and changing technologies have left lasting legacies in fashion. Techniques, designs, materials, tailoring, and silhouettes were borrowed and adapted across cultures.


Broadly, this gallery addresses three questions: What textiles do people wear and use in different parts of Asia? How have fashion and textiles in Asia responded to world changes? How have styles and materials from Asia impacted the world?


The first display in this gallery features highlights from the Chinese textiles collection of Chris Hall. Collecting since 1978, Chris Hall has amassed one of the most important private collections of Chinese textiles. Highlights were shown at ACM in the 2005 special exhibition Power Dressing: Textiles for Rulers and Priests. The current display probes deeply into this rich collection to explore issues around dress as China entered into the 20th century, across three sections:


Fashion Revolution: Chinese dress from late Qing to 1976

Within a century, from the late Qing dynasty to the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), Chinese dress experienced a fashion revolution in materials and design. This display presents Chinese dress as diverse and evolving, dynamically reflecting a century of drastic political, economic, and socio-cultural changes. Dress and bodies – especially women's bodies – became objects of intense debates about nationhood, modernity, gender, style, and identity.


Hierarchy, modernity, uniformity

Three chronological sections, beginning with the late Qing period (1820–1911), show the evolution. In the early years of the dynasty, the Manchu rulers decreed a rigid dress code at court to signify rank – and to add elements of their outsider cultural background. In the last years of the Qing dynasty, however, the rules were challenged. During the Republican period (1912–45), after the old imperial order had crumbled and an influx of democratic and Western ideas, sartorial expressions became extremely varied.


Exuberance, then repression

The new fashions embodied ideas of modernity and nationalism, giving rise to new styles, including the iconic qipao. Under the leadership of Mao Zedong (chairman, 1949–76), ideals of an equal Communist society swept through China, and Chinese dress narrowed to a few uniform designs, including the iconic “Mao suit”, obliterating differences in style, gender, and class.



About Mr Chris Hall

Chris Hall has been collecting Chinese textiles since 1978 and has accumulated one of the best collections of Chinese textiles in the world. The collection covers all types of Chinese textiles dating from 500 BC to the 21st century. Chris has written articles on Chinese textiles and frequently gives lectures about them. Chris was born in the Sudan in 1952 to British parents. His father was working in the British colonial administration at the time. Chris has also lived for a short time in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Malta, and Malawi. He is now based in Hong Kong, where he has lived for nearly 50 years, and works as an accountant specialising in international tax. Chris was educated in England at Framlingham College and studied history at Cambridge University.




OTHER GALLERIES
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    Ceramics
    The Ceramics gallery presents a comprehensive survey of Chinese ceramics from the Neolithic period through the Qing dynasty. In particular, ACM's excellent collection of Dehua porcelain, also popularly known as "blanc de chine", is on display.
  • Gallery
    Maritime Trade and Court & Company Galleries

    For thousands of years, the cultures of Asia have traded, interacted, and exchanged ideas. Many works of art in this section show global demand and evidence of shifting tastes as traders moved from region to region. It also tells us how special objects were eagerly sought in lands far away, and how new works of art were created through the blending of different sources.

  • Gallery
    Tang Shipwreck
    Nearly 1100 years ago, an Arab ship bearing a precious cargo of ceramics, gold, silver set sail from the port of Canton. Just off the shores of Sumatra, near the island of Belitung, the ship sank, and remained untouched until discovered by chance in 1998.

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Last Updated on 29 Jun 2020