Nandan,Guangxi Baikuyao Ethnic Costumes Research

In the long development history of humans, clothing is an indispensableconstituent part of human culture. Humans engrave concepts about beauty on clothingand provide clothing with double charm-artistic and historical charm. From theevolution process of clothing, we can clearly see the trace of era development,development of social productive forces and the change of humans’ aestheticconsciousness and mental attitude. In the large system of clothing culture in China,minority costume plays a very important role. It is the portrayal of living art of variousminority nationalities and highly integrates social characteristics such as politicalsystem, religious belief, moral idea and cultural customs in the development process ofminority nationalities. National costumes in different forms present the unique survivalmode of minority nationalities in different regions.Baikuyao is a subline of the Yao nationality, which got its name due to costume. Ithas ancient and glorious national culture. In the history, ancestors of Baikuyao wereearly separated from the large parent-Yao nationality and lived in remote mountainsand hinderland for a long time, making its costume greatly different from other sublinesof the Yao nationality. It developed its own national signs. After a long time, thecostume of Baikuyao is still simple and unsophisticated with a unique style. It retainsdistinctive regional characteristics and profound vitality and presents the uniqueaesthetic sentiment of Baikuyao people. Baikuyao costume is the crystal of collectiveintelligence of Baikuyao people, the treasure of traditional culture of Baikuyaonationality and an ageless artistic form in Yaoshan Mountain. Through in-depth study onBaikuyao costume, we can realize cultural characteristics of Baikuyao nationality suchas the historical origin, national psychology, aesthetic sentiment and religious belief andmeanwhile draw a lot of elements of national culture so as to enrich the style of modernclothing design.This paper first describes the historical origin and natural and humanisticenvironment of Baikuyao nationality in detail based on field survey and presents theecosystem that the occurrence and development of its traditional costume depends on;analyzes the content of its clothing culture in detail in combination with the traditionalcultural background of Baikuyao nationality and summarizes characteristics of variouselements such as material, process, color and patter, structure and style of Baikuyaocostume, factors influencing the formation of Baikuyao clothing culture and multiple cultural characteristics reflected by the traditional costume. In this graduation subjectstudy, the author pays much attention to the research on the style of Baikuyao traditionalcostume, endeavors to explore the structural characteristics and forming reasons ofclothing style when humans first got dressed in combination with professionalknowledge such as human engineering and expects to provide a new angle of view forthe research of ethnic elements on modern clothing design, manufacturing andapplication.