Overview
The Three Kingdoms opens China’s long division, and its dress is best read as Han clothing under strain. The forms continue — the cross-collar robe, the shenyi — but the authority that had regulated them is gone, and among the educated elite that loosening becomes a style with a philosophy attached to it.
Key garments and style
The standard garment remains the robe crossing right over left, belted, worn long, with the shenyi — the one-piece robe joining an upper and lower section — still in formal use. Officials kept caps distinguishing rank as far as any court could enforce them.
What changes is proportion and manner. Elite men take to very wide sleeves, loosely fastened collars and a studied carelessness of dress, the beginning of what later ages called the Wei-Jin air. It was not simply fashion: the scholars associated with it, the circle around the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove among them, made unconstraint a deliberate stance in a period when public office was dangerous, and dressing loosely was part of declining to perform.
Wartime scarcity did the rest, and hemp and coarse cloth spread where silk had been.
Transition
Under the Jin and the Northern and Southern dynasties the northern riding outfit and the southern wide-sleeved robe developed side by side, and the fusion of the two set up the Sui and Tang wardrobe.