Overview
Tang dress is the most cosmopolitan in Chinese history, and the reason is geography: Chang’an sat at the eastern end of the Silk Road and held communities of Sogdians, Persians, Turks and others. Foreign cut, foreign cloth and foreign taste entered the wardrobe of the capital and were treated as fashionable rather than as barbarian.
Key garments and style
Women wore the ruqun — a short jacket over a long skirt tied high on the chest, sometimes above the bust — with the pibo, a long gauze stole carried over the arms, and often the banbi, a half-sleeved overgarment. Colours were strong, necklines by the eighth century were low, and the fashionable figure grew fuller, as the tomb figurines and the paintings show.
The striking thing is what women were permitted. Tang women rode, played polo and appeared in public in men’s dress and in Central Asian hu clothing — narrow sleeves, trousers, boots and pointed caps — and were painted doing it.
Officials wore the round-collar robe with the futou, rank read from colour in a fixed order, purple and scarlet at the top through green and blue below.
Transition
The Song reacted against all of it, favouring a narrow, muted and covered line that read as discipline where the Tang had read as confidence.