Women’s Fashion Of The Tang Dynasty

The inclusive magnificent culture and extraordinary tolerant magnanimity of Tang Dynasty, creates an unprecedented flourishing era in Chinese history. Women’s costume shows the ever dazzling appearance in the Tang Dynasty and becomes the most brilliant and abundant chapter in the ancient Chinese costume culture. The paper mainly focuses on the following aspects:1. Women’s Costume in the Tang DynastyThe most common everyday costumes of women in the Tang Dynasty are jacket, shirt, skirt and semi-sleeve and so on. Jacket and shirt are upper garments, and the women’s favorite colors are red and green. Jacket is supposed to withstand the cold in winter, while shirt is covered in spring or summer. One is thick and the other is light. Women in the Tang Dynasty prefer dresses, while cage skirt, gored skirt, broken skirt are also the styles they favor. The clothing colors of red, green, and yellow are quite popular. The decorative patterns on skirts were colorful, such as phoenix, mandarin duck, swallow, peacock etc. Semi-sleeve is short upper garment which women wear outside the jacket and shirt, also called semi-sleeve or short-sleeve, the adornments of which are splendid since worn outside.The social customs of the Tang Dynasty are affected deeply by Hu (the Northern barbarian tribe in ancient China) convention. Hu clothing, Hu makeup, Hu dance and Hu music are all the rage at the time. Narrow clothing, tight sleeves, topless, Hu cap, Hu boots, Uighur clothing, mallet bun and ochre face, are the representative clothing with the impact of Hu convention.2. Women’s Hair Styles and Hair Accessories in the Tang DynastyThe women’s hair styles in the Tang Dynasty are diverse and can be divided into three types:high bun, low bun and special bun. High Bun is very popular at that time, including half turned bun, anti bun, bicyclic bun, Uighur bun, hill bun, abandoning home bun, sweeping makeup bun, swan bun, mallet bun, cloud bun, spiral bun, Wu Man bun, etc. Low bun is quite rare in the Tang Dynasty, fall bun, pirate fall bun, hanging bun are all of this kind. Special bun is decorated with flowers, jewelry, phoenix hairpin and so on, called the flower bun, jewelry bun and phoenix bun. Combing high bun requires enough hair. For the women with short hair, thin hair or the bald, they have to pull on some wigs or simply wear a wig to make it fashionable. Chignon is relatively common in the Tang Dynasty, people always knit with materials such as woven wire and then put on the hair, called chignon, righteous bun or heroine.Hair on the temples in the Tang Dynasty is quite unique. There are a variety of items according to their thickness, density, size, number and shape, such as slow temples, crow temples, thin temples, Cong temples, cloud temples and so on.A lot of decorative items will be inserted in a bun by Tang women. Single strand of hair hairpin, hairpin, double-stranded hairpin,"Step shake" inlaid with the hairpin; or some flowers, fake flowers or flower-tin; Combs are also sometimes used as decorations inserted on top of the bun. The materials of decorations are of mineral gold, silver, copper, iron, jade, stone, jade, glass, crystal; plant-based wood, bamboo, flowers, grass; animal-based rhinoceros, bone, ivory, horn, tortoiseshell, feathers and so on.3. The women’s face decorations and makeup in the Tang DynastyThe procedure of Tang women’s make-up can be divided into7steps:scribbling powder, wiping rouge, blackening the eyebrows, pasting decals (or dyeing yellow on forehead), pointing surface dimple, describing oblique red and painting lips.Tang women advocate whiteness, smearing white powder is the basic step of makeup. Powders mainly contain lead powders and rice powders. To show tender-red healthy complexion, the women of the Tang Dynasty also paint rouge in the cheeks. There are two ways of blackening eyebrows for women:directly dyeing the material on eyebrows, or shaving the eyebrows and re-painted. Eyebrow types are various, such as moth eyebrow, willow eyebrow, crescent eyebrow, slant eyebrow, hill eyebrow, bay leaf eyebrow etc.Dyeing the yellow powder on the forehead between the eyebrows is called Yellow Forehead. Decals affixed to the forehead are known as Huazi, and women usually cut the foil, colored paper, or fish bone into various types, then put the adhesive glue on the forehead or between eyebrows. The types of decals are various, from the simplest dot to complex plants and animals’patterns.Oblique red refers to painting cheeks with two bright-red crescent ornaments, even painting to dilapidated state. Surface dimple originally means painting a red dot separately on dimpled cheeks, so-called fake dimples. Later it develops to affixing shapes like money, stars, flowers to the face using materials like gold or green feathers. And the painted ornaments range from the cheeks gradually expanding to the middle of forehead or on both sides of the nose.Tang people tend to consider gaudy petite lips as beauty. As to make-up, women first cover the lips and face with powders, then dye lipstick to make a small cherry mouth. The lip colors pointed are mainly red or reddish.There is a wide-range change of Tang women’s makeup, from no powder to heavy makeup with dozens of types. White makeup and red makeup are more common, the former including tears makeup and crying makeup, the latter containing sandalwood dizzy makeup, wine dizzy makeup, peach makeup and rosy cloud makeup and so on. Purple makeup, ocher face, ink makeup, careless makeup and bruise makeup belong to special makeup.