Overview
Seventy years of division did more to Chinese dress than their length suggests, because this is where the Tang silhouette narrows into the Song one. Tang fullness — broad sleeves, high-waisted skirts worn loose, strong colour — gives way to something slimmer, quieter and more covered. The southern courts, above all the Southern Tang at Nanjing and the Later Shu in Sichuan, were the refined centres while the north changed dynasty five times.
Key garments and style
Women kept the ruqun, the short jacket over a high-waisted skirt, but cut narrower, with the shawl-like pibo still draped over the arms and the palette moving toward softer, cooler tones. Men wore the round-collar robe with the futou on the head — by now less a wrapped cloth than a made hat, whose stiffened side flaps would harden into the long horizontal wings of Song officialdom.
This period is also where footbinding enters the record. The tradition credits its beginning to the Southern Tang court and the dancer Yaoniang, who is said to have bound her feet to dance on a lotus-shaped platform for Li Yu; whether or not that story is literally true, the practice is first described in this period and spread through the Song. It is the single most consequential change in Chinese dress to originate in these decades.
The Night Revels of Han Xizai is the period’s famous witness, and worth describing precisely: attributed to Gu Hongzhong of the Southern Tang court, the scroll that survives is generally held to be a later Song copy, so it is evidence for this dress at one remove rather than a contemporary photograph of it.
Transition
The Song reunification carried the slimmer line to its conclusion, in a court aesthetic of restraint, plain silks and understated colour that consciously set itself against Tang display.