The New Look

As half a million Chinese streamed past the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Peking's May Day parade, a stiff breeze caught thousands of colored banners and whipped them through the air. It was a fine day for the public reappearance of one of the revolution's most lamented victims: the skirt. For the first time, women marchers stepped along smartly in bright spring frocks and blouses instead of the sexless jackets and pants of recent years.

When the Communists took over China in 1949. Red leaders continued to wear their "liberation uniform"--dark trousers and jackets usually padded into shapelessness with cotton. Out of both prudence and necessity China's people followed suit, and women's clothes became almost indistinguishable from men's. Those who had chi pao (long gowns), like their slinky, slit-skirted sisters in Hong Kong and Singapore, put them out of sight.

Visitors to China found this sartorial conformity grim and depressing, and said so. When even the Russians complained (one said that he could not tell the difference between boys and girls in a school), the Chinese decided it was time for a change. Said a Chinese official ruefully: "In the Moscow theater, wherever there is a cloud of black and grey, that is the Chinese delegation." Several months ago, the Peking government began to encourage a new style that would better reflect "the happiness of the socialist society that our people are enjoying."

But the people, having learned the safety of anonymity, were wary of proclaiming an individuality or a prosperity that might later be used against them. They had to be urged. Said a Peking commentator: "Let a few pioneers set the example and the masses will follow." To push the new look, fashion shows were staged in Peking. Shanghai, Canton and other cities. Despite warnings against tight dresses and too much "making up," sales of brassieres and Imperial Concubine face powder (named for a famous beauty of the Tang dynasty) shot up. A government official even spoke of "the beauty of curves." A dress shop opened last week in Peking with 3,000 spring dress varieties on sale.

Cried a Peking commentator: "Trees are budding and flowers are in bloom; let everyone of us dress up gaily, and compete with the beautiful spring." Nonetheless, practically all the men continued to wear liberation uniforms, and many women cautiously covered their new dresses with old clothes. The timid scanned the May Day reviewing stand for signs that would give them courage, but Chairman Mao and his gang appeared in their old dark suits, more like a phalanx of rigid revolutionaries than flowers in bloom.

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