Wear Hanfu

Entering autumn, in addition to adapting to the weather, we also should change the style of clothes we wear. Temperatures in autumn are around 60% cold and 40% hot, because the sun doesn't last long and the weather tends to seem dark. It often rains but not heavily, when in early autumn there is a lot of fog that appears in the morning. So, warm clothes are more suitable to wear during this season. Now, the spread of hanfu is getting more and more widespread, and everyone can definitely see many people wearing hanfu in everyday life. Be it male or female, young or old, there are many people who wear Hanfu. So, what kind of hanfu should you wear in autumn? It's early fall, and the weather is a little cooler than summer, but not too cold. Therefore, hanfu worn in summer can still be worn today. For example, qixiong ruqun. In addition, Song dynasty hanfu, such as xuanqun, beizi, baidiequn, and others are also very suitable to be worn in autumn. When autumn is a little deeper, everyone can wear thicker hanfu. For example, the Ming dynasty hanfu which is very suitable to be worn in autumn. Of…

Haha so I lied in the last article, we’re actually doing the Tang Dynasty next! This is for sure going to be a favorite of everyone—after all, who can resist the flamboyant, vibrant beauty of the Tang Dynasty? Let’s get right to it and see where some of our favorite Tang Dynasty hanfu comes from. The Tang Dynasty was a period of time (618–907CE) preceded by the Wei/Jin Northern and Southern Dynasties and proceeded by the Five Dynasties Ten Kingdoms period, and then the Song Dynasty (the Five Dynasties Ten Kingdoms period is often regarded as part of the Tang fashion period for hanfu purposes because the fashion trends followed pretty closely). A flourishing golden age for China, the Tang Dynasty saw leaps and bounds in art, poetry, and exchange of culture—the most open-minded society that has existed in the world in a very long time. People freely exchanged cultural norms, aesthetics, and ideas between nations from the Silk Road and beyond, resulting in a blossoming of the world of clothing as well, and a rich collection of art for us to reference our hanfu off of.   Astana Cemetery Interestingly, not a lot of clothing of the Tang Dynasty…

Who says hanfu is uncomfortable for daily use? Some people feel that hanfu is too complicated to wear, uncomfortable, and unsuitable for modern daily life. Hanfu itself is a kind of Chinese national dress that includes the everyday clothes of all the ancient Han people. Back then, no one had ever said that hanfu was uncomfortable and can't be used in daily life. Like ancient hanfu, modern hanfu is a type of clothing that can meet people's daily needs at home, travel and work. Modern hanfu? Modern hanfu is functional and elegant. With a blend of sophisticated cotton & silk fabrics, this style is easy to wear and easy to wash. It is enough to care for it by washing it in cold water on a gentle cycle and then hanging it to dry. The luxury modern women crave, whether it's layering or lounging, this piece is durable and soft. Who tend to wear modern hanfu most often - in some cases on a daily basis - are girls and boys, students and teachers, tourists and cultural workers. In some places with unique views of ancient gardens, it is required to wear traditional or modern hanfu clothing whenever appearing in…

  Vocabulary Velvet Flower - 绒花 (rónghuā) - a realistically made flower made artificially from silk threads and copper wire. Palace Flower - 宫花 (gōng huā) - another way to call ronghua with the rise in popularities of ronghua to females in the palace. Untwisted Silks - 无捻蚕丝 (wú niǎn cánsī) - when it comes to silk threads, depending on the type and material of the threads, one single thread can be made up of thinner threads twisted together. Untwisted silk thread means there are no smaller twisted threads. You can directly skip to the brushing steps in ronghua making process. Hunan Embroidery Thread - 湘绣线 (xiāngxiù xiàn) - another type of thread used in ronghua making. Suzhou Embroidery Thread - 苏绣线 (sūxiù xiàn) - another type of thread used in ronghua making.   History 绒花, rónghuā, an artificial handcraft head accessories made from materials such as silks and coppers. It existed since the Qin Dynasty. There are many known “brands” of ronghuas, such as Nanjing Ronghua. In the Tang era, Wu Zetian listed Nanjing Ronghua as a royal tribute to the Yangzhou area becoming a luxury only princes and princesses can use. Eventually, Nanjing Ronghua became something that represents Nanjing but also…

The beauty of autumn is that you can apply different dressing rules even though the seasonal temperature changes. Blending hanfu and fashion elements together to explode with an unforgettable sense of tradition and fashion. In this article, Hanfu Times recommends three types of hanfu items and the best dressing principles for fall to find your own fall hanfu street fashion.   Round Neck Shirt/Robe The round neck shirt/robe is the most suitable hanfu item for all skin types and body types. The collar can be decorated with nice buttons and can be folded into different lapel styles, which can be worn as a top or as a windbreaker jacket depending on the thickness of the material. The cuffs can be added or modified with cufflinks, turning them into arrow sleeves or bubble sleeves, suitable for a mix of different personalities. The lower skirt can be mixed with a Poqun, or a Mamianqun. If it is a solid color, the waist and then add a medium width belt, can cover the original skirt waist, but also to trim the body shape. The bottom can also be mixed with fashion pants, fashion chinos, lantern pants, or wide-legged pants.   Stand Collar Shirt…

Hey everyone, thanks for waiting! Our next topic is gonna be pretty exciting for most of you who love the classic ruqun aesthetic: we’re going to be going over the historical relics for the Wei/Jin and Northern/Southern Dynasty! Since there are so few of these relics, this article is going to focus on the Wei/Jin Dynasty as a whole, including restored relics, art references, and misconceptions about the Wei/Jin Dynasty. It might be a bit of a shorter article due to little material, but I know that people are really interested in this period of time, so let’s get to it! 魏晉南北朝/魏晋南北朝/wei4 jin4 nan2 bei3 chao2/Wei/Jin and Northern/Southern Dynasties refers to the period of time between 220 and 589CE. Also known as 六朝/六朝/liu4 chao2/Six Dynasties, this set of dynasties are compressed into one general block of time by historians because of the rapid exchange of power. Following the Eastern Han dynasty, the Three Kingdoms period had the Cao Wei kingdom at its forefront, with the Western Jin Dynasty coming right after ruled by Sima Yan. This was followed by the Northern Dynasties, when the Northern Wei, Western Wei, Easter Wei, and Northern Zhou and Qi Dynasties followed each other rapidly,…

I made my first real Hanfu based on patterns from this website. First outing at the beach, with dragons and all. Here is an article with much details on my sewing journey.

Quju is a type of hanfu that belongs to the Shenyi dress system and was common during the Qin and Han dynasties, with characteristics such as "overlapping and hooked edges". In ancient times, the more grand the occasion, the more gorgeous the overall look of the Quju was, giving it a sense of grace and elegance. There is a wide variety of accessories and items that can be matched with Quju, and different types of accessories can create different effects with Quju dress. Let's follow Hanfu Shidai (汉服世代) to learn more about it.   01 Dao Shan Dao Shan (刀扇), also known as Bian Shan (便扇), Bian Mian (便面), is a kind of Chinese traditional fan, used to cover the face, shaped like a door. Book of Han - Zhang Chang's Tale has recorded: "自以便面拊马 (patting a horse with a Bian Mian by himself)". Yan Shigu, the historian of the Tang Dynasty, also explained the function of the Bian Mian in his commentary on the Book of Han: “便面，所以障面，盖扇之类也。不欲见人，以此自障面，则得其便，故曰便面，亦曰屏面。” We can learn that the "Bian Mian" can be classified as a fan, but its focus is different, the main function of is not to fan the wind and cool, but to…

Brief history on Chinese tool panbo and how it is different in the past when compared to Japanese tasuki.

So you’ve built up a little bit of a collection, and you’re having a bit of a dilemma: With all this fabric hanging out in your closet, you’ve begun to run out of space. You don’t even know how to store these properly—and yet you want to buy more hanfu! Never fear; here’s a tried and true system that I and many other hanfu enthusiasts use to store our hanfu in a way that doesn’t harm the fabric and allows you to use your space most efficiently.   Skirts The easiest, most intuitive way to store your skirts is always going to hanging them. Look for these kinds of hangers that have strong clips on them, and try to choose ones that have larger, flatter clips so that they don’t leave marks on your skirt. To hang the skirt, fold the head of the skirt in thirds, then pull the ribbon out from the innermost side of the skirt. Clip the skirt head with the clips on the hanger, making sure that all three layers are clipped in, then pick up the ribbons together and loop them around the hanger’s hook so they don’t trail on the ground and get…

So now that you’ve learned about all these pieces separately, we arrive at the question: how do we put all of these pieces together? Let’s go over some ways these are usually put together, how to refer to them, and other details that might not have been covered in previous articles. Body, sleeves, collar: these are the main three things that we use to distinguish types of hanfu. In naming conventions, we usually refer to a piece in the order of collar-sleeve-body. Take a look at this image: What body type, sleeve type, and collar type is it? Well, I’ll tell you first that this is a Shan, meaning that it’s a single-layered top or robe shorter than the knees with no yao lan. Take a look at the sleeves—do they curve or change in diameter at all? Yes, they seem to narrow in a striaght line from the root of the sleeve to the cuff, meaning this is a feijixiu design, or airplane sleeve. The collar’s shape is pretty obviously parallel, or duijin, since the two sides come straight down and don’t touch. Well then, we can refer to this as a duijin feijixiu shan: a parallel collar, airplane…

A detailed descriptions of hanfu skirt's hem. There are different hem lengths to a hanfu skirt, you can follow these descriptions to choose the one suitable for you.

"Collar" refers to not only the area of a piece of clothing around the neck, but also the fabric below that. Since hanfu is almost always constructed of two pieces of fabric that aren't fully connected at the front, and put on like a jacket, collar also refers to ways that these two piece of fabric connect once the piece is on your body.   交領/交领/jiao1 ling3/Crossed Collar Probably the first type of collar that you’ll see—the crossed collar, or jiaoling. This collar consists of two overlapping pieces and is usually secured with two to three ties, with a thicker or contrasting border along the edge of each piece. It’s almost always right over left, or if you think about it in terms of how to put it on, you tie the left ties before you tie the right ties. The result is a y-shaped collar when viewed from the front. Ming dynasty people may have done it the other way, as well as various non-Han groups and clothes put on the deceased at funerals, but it’s generally a good rule of thumb to follow right over left. as it’s one of the most important cultural concepts in hanfu. These…

As one of the main composition elements of hanfu tops and robes, sleeves can have a lot of variation. They mostly fall into a couple categories that we have recovered historical artifacts from, though a lot of manufacturers end up with some variation in their patterns. Today we’ll go over a whole ten sleeve types, a bit of historical context, and some of the variations they can go through. Before we get into that, though, let’s go over a little basic information that applies to (almost) all hanfu sleeves. One of the defining characteristics of the hanfu is the 接袖/接袖/jie1 xiu4/sleeve connection. What this means is that the sleeve is not connected to the body of the top or robe at the shoulder, but at a point partway down the upper arm, with the body of the clothing and part of the arm being made up of one piece of fabric, and the rest of the sleeve of another. These are stitched together to create the whole sleeve. The rest of the sleeve is also made of one piece of fabric both front and back, folded over the top and stitched together at the bottom. Some exceptions to this are…

The construction of the body of most hanfu tops and robes is what usually decides what ’type’ of hanfu it is. We’ll go over a few common types of hanfu and what features they have. There are, however, a few rules that pretty much all hanfu tends to follow: First, there’s always a seam down the middle of the back, meaning that the piece of clothing is made up of one piece of fabric on the left and one on the right, stitched together in the center. There’s also never a seam at the shoulder like we have in modern clothing—instead of the front and back being two different pieces of fabric, the front and back are made up of the same piece, just folded over the shoulder. Another thing to note is that while we often refer to tops and robes in hanfu as the two main categories, that isn’t how hanfu is really categorized, just a way for us to talk about the shape of things in English. Instead, we have the 長/长/chang2/long versions and 短/短/duan3/short versions of clothing, which can be applied to most categories of clothing that we separate by construction—the only difference is length. Short…

First installment of the Hanfu in Components series is up! As a reminder, if you haven’t already, check out the introductory article to best find out how to use this guide, otherwise some things might not make sense to you. If you’ve done that already, charge on forward! To kick off the series, this is a brief article explaining how exactly we’re going to break down hanfu into its basic components. We’re still in the introductory stages here, but bear with me and we’ll get to the fun stuff soon.   WHAT MAKES HANFU, HANFU? What defines 漢服/汉服/han4 fu2/hanfu? What sets it apart from everyone else? How do we know when something is truly hanfu, as opposed to hanfu-inspired? These questions can be kind of scary when you first look at them, scared of making a mistake—don’t worry, it’s actually pretty simple! First, we should understand that hanfu isn’t just something that we derived off of paintings and imperial dramas. Every type of hanfu that we have today was recovered as a rotting piece of cloth that we dug up from the ground, studied by historians and made into clothing patterns (‘pattern’ refers the shape of the fabric pieces and…

Hey again everyone! I’m super excited to be introducing a new series that I’m going to be writing over the next few… days? weeks? However much time it takes me to get all of this out! This collection of articles, Hanfu in Components, is a perfect introduction for those of you semi-newbies who feel a little overwhelmed by all the different kinds of hanfu and want to learn more beyond the very basics but can’t find the best place to start. We’ll break down hanfu into its basic components, talk about what parts make up a piece of han clothing, and briefly explore the shape, history, and pattern of each part so that you can get familiar with the way that hanfu is pieced together, no deep historical background needed.   WHAT THIS SERIES WILL COVER Introduction (this article) Hanfu Construction Tops & Robes (Body) Sleeves Collars Putting it All Together   WHAT THIS SERIES WON’T COVER (may change in the future): Skirts (but you can find my article about Types of Hanfu Skirts here! Also may change in the future) Pants (may change in the future) Hanfu underlayers (but you can find my article about Basics of Hanfu Underlayers here!…

Not a week later and I'm back again with the details on our even larger, even longer hanfu outing just last weekend on Saturday, August 13th! You can check out our absolutely PHENOMENAL photographer this time at @Ryfucius on Instagram, he was incredibly dedicated and we couldn't have done it without him. Inspired by the fun we had on the East Coast New England outing, Yulan and I decided to plan a second outing for our SF Bay Area friends on the West Coast too. This time with a party of 14 and a whole day's time, our itinerary was expanded to include multiple photo locations and a karaoke session at the end of the day—and hey, I got to participate this time! Our first stop was the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, a beautiful park with a lot of natural beauties. Our main target location was the Chinese Pavilion, an incredible work of archtiecture gifted to San Francisco by Taiwan. With a pointed roof and some enchanting carvings in the pillars and benches surrounding the pavilion, it was a perfect spot for a group photo as well as a lot of solo shots. We couldn't waste the rest…

Hey everyone—a little busy as of late, but rest assured that I am not dead! I just had to pop back to belatedly report on the 2022 Scholar's Garden Hanfu Outing organized by Yulan/Chlobaltblue in our hanfu discord server community! This half-day event consisted of a photoshoot and group dinner on July 30th, 2022 in the New York Chinese Scholar's Garden with a small group of eight people attending. People from all over New England joined us for this outing, from Conneticut residents to Boston students flying all the way up to Staten Island. Unfortunately I was not one of those people, but I'm here to share with you all the pictures and experience that my sister provided! I'll also be doing a brief summary of some of the outfits that everyone is wearing. Some of our members had their own sets, while others borrowed from each other. A majority of our outfits were Wei/Jin Style (魏晉風)  outfits which consisted of a zhequn, cross collar top, and daxiushan. Ani also wore a Ming-style summer set, with a modified zhuyao with pearl buttons in the front to mimic the zimu buttons of a zhuyao and a Ming helingshan, a style that greatly resembles…

Is it appropriate to wear hanfu in summer? Hanfu makers are more concerned with this question. Light fabrics, half-sleeve designs, and fresh colors have become their solution to allow hanfu lovers to wear beautiful hanfu even in the hot summer. Redsugarx in the community has already shared how to choose hanfu in summer. And in this post, I've brought together 10 green hanfu dress styles, I hope will helpful in your next hanfu shopping. They all have one thing in common, give you a touch of freshness in the summer heat. So, let's get started. 1 Modified hanfu top + Bai Die Qun   2 Ming dynasty: square collar Shan + sarong skirt   3 Song dynasty: Moxiong + Shan + San Jian Qun   4 Song Dynasty: Hanfu camisole + Beizi + Bai Die Qun   5 Song Dynasty: Hanfu camisole + Beizi + Zhe Qun   6 Ming dynasty: round-necked Shan + Moxiong + Ma Mian Qun   7 Wei and Jin dynasties: Ruqun   8 Ming Dynasty: sarong Shan + Ma Mian Qun   9 Qixiong Shanqun   10 Song Dynasty: Shanqun + Beizi More about summer hanfu:

Song Hanfu is never absent from summer wear, and most of them are made of silk, tencel, and other breathable materials that will bring you a touch of coolness in the hot summer. 1 Moxiong + Changshan + Zhequn The Changshan (long shirt) is very light, with delicate floral embroidery at the collar edge. The silk material is comfortable and skin-friendly, with a gentle color scheme. The fabric of Moxiong (a kind of Song Dynasty underwear) is a chemical fiber fabric, has a good feel. Chiffon material skirt, with breathable performance, good drape.   2 Diaodai + Changshan + Jianqun The single-layer Diaodai (camisole, a kind of Song Dynasty underwear) is decorated with pearls, and the material has a dark pattern of bamboo leaves. The Changshan has a dark pattern of diamond lattice with a bright scarlet color, and the placket is decorated with small pearls and webbing, which is soft and smooth to the touch and comfortable on the body. The skirt is with a dark pattern of twisted grapes. The use of large dark patterns adds to the luxury of this hanfu.   3 Diaodai + Duanshan + Baidie Qun The main color of this Song hanfu is…

As requested by user @Wei on my Mamianqun article, here’s a little summary of all the most popular hanfu skirt (qun or 裙) types and what the difference between them is! I’m not going to go into as much detail as the previous article since my goal is to go through them all quickly and teach you the differences between them, but I’ll be including some brief details on their name, history, construction, and features so that you can better understand the huge variety of skirts in hanfu. Let’s start off with some basics rules hanfu skirts tend to follow. Skirts are made up of one or two pieces of fabric, usually, and they take the shape of a flat piece of pleated or non pleated cloth that gets wrapped around the body and tied in place by ribbons/ties. There are very few exceptions to this, except in hanyuansu, which is modified hanfu for convenience and style. The waistband of the skirt is usually 6-8cm wide and made with a different piece of fabric than the body of the skirt, which the body of the skirt is then attached to—this is referred to as the skirt head (裙頭). But even…

Brief history describing the purpose of yunjian, history, and changes overtime between modern period and past.

Hey everyone! I’m so sorry about how late this is since I promised this like… three weeks ago, but here’s a little outfit analysis of the rainbow pride outfit that I designed and posted a few pictures of last month! Disclaimer: While I design the shapes, fabrics, and combinations of my hanfu designs, I do not sew any of my hanfu designs! This is due to the fact that I could not sew a straight line to sew my life. Instead I work with various small independent tailors, seamstresses and hanfu workshops.   THE BASIC STATS I chose to make this set a Song Dynasty hanyuansu. Song style hanfu has long been known to be the most popular in the summer with its flowy and light layers, and me being in Taiwan for pretty much all of pride month meant that I needed to be able to stay cool in 37+ degrees while hanging around outside for pictures. The main modifications in this set are to the top piece, which is a 吊帶, or camisole, with straps. This is a very simple three-piece set that gives all of its attention to the rainbow skirt. The three pieces include the camisole…