Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity

Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity celebrates the creativity, resilience, and sartorial heritage of generations of women whose lives, and wardrobes, spanned the globe. This exhibition will be on view at LACMA from June 14th through October 12th, 2026.

Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity accompanies the first major exhibition outside China to comprehensively examine modern Chinese women’s fashion from the late Qing dynasty through the 1960s. Drawing exclusively from LACMA’s permanent collection—including key acquisitions and anticipated gifts—the publication explores how women’s dress evolved amid seismic shifts in Chinese society. Through more than seventy rare ensembles, it traces transformations in silhouette, tailoring, and textile innovation, revealing the ways fashion responded to globalization, modernization, and
women’s changing roles.

Two essays, as well as an introduction by Michaela Hansen and Sharon Sadako Takeda, offer original research and nuanced perspectives. Mei Mei Rado investigates fashion’s interplay with rapid historical and cultural changes in China, while Michaela Hansen analyzes how industrial and technological advances reshaped Chinese textile design. The publication highlights the emergence of the qipao in the 1920s and charts its adaptation across the diaspora in the 1940s–60s as it became a modern icon of Chinese femininity.

3D-printed mannequins bring to life fashionable women’s body types from the 1890s through the 1960s,and feature a mannequin face and nine unique, historically inspired hairstyles designed by New York-based Taiwanese-Canadian fashion designer Jason Wu.



Edited by Michaela Hansen, Foreword by Michael Govan, Preface by Jason Wu, Introduction by Sharon Sadako Takeda and Michaela Hansen, Essays by Michaela Hansen and Mei Mei Rado


- Hardcover
- 144 pages
- 11 × 8.25 inches
- Designer: James Gamboa, LACMA
- Published by Los Angeles County Museum of Art/DelMonico Books•D.A.P., April 2026