"Clothing and accessories from nineteenth-century China reveal much about women's participation-as both consumers and producers-in the commercialization of textile handicrafts and the flourishing of urban popular culture in the late Qing dynasty (1644-1911). The potential of clothing and textiles to illuminate issues of gender and identity is examined in this interdisciplinary foray into cultural history and material culture, which draws on vernacular and commercial sources to explain these objects, rather than on the official and imperial texts that have prevailed in studies of Chinese dress history. As production systems and market economies created the modern phenomenon of fashion, commercialized handicrafts transformed the early modern Chinese fashion system. Challenging the conventional production model, in which isolated Chinese women embroidered items by themselves, Rachel Silberstein positions objects of fashionable dress within mid-Qing networks of urban guilds, operated commercial workshops, and subcontracted female workers. These networks gave Chinese women opportunities to participate in fashion in new, connected, and contemporary ways. The formation of a commercialized dress and handicraft industry was thus stimulated by female-oriented domestic fashionable consumption as well as by foreign markets"-- Provided by publisher.