Horse Face Skirt

What is Horse Face Skirt?

The horse-face skirt is one of the main skirt styles for women in ancient China. It also known as “horse-face pleated skirt”.

In recent years, the horse-face skirt has been reintroduced and used in the fashion field, so let’s learn more about the horse-face skirt.

It was mainly prevalent in the Ming and Qing dynasties, with four skirt doors as its distinctive feature, four skirt doors are decorated, the inner skirt door is less decorated or no decoration, the horse face skirt side tuck, skirt waist often with white cloth, to take the meaning of “growing old together”.

The History of Horse-Face Skirt

The horse-face skirt has a long history in China, so let’s learn more about the history of the horse-face skirt.

Ming Dynasty

The Ming Dynasty’s horse-faced skirt was developed from the Song Dynasty’s spin skirt. The spin skirt was a functional “skirt with open crotch” designed by Song Dynasty women to facilitate donkey riding.

The spinning skirt of the Song Dynasty developed into a horse-faced skirt in the Ming Dynasty. During the Chenghua period of the Ming Dynasty, everyone in the capital liked to wear horse-faced skirts. From the queen down to the people, everyone wore a horse-faced skirt. However, the texture, decoration and color of the dresses were strictly different for different classes. The skirt was simple, with beautiful colors and a fresh and elegant feeling.

Qing Dynasty

In the Qing Dynasty, the horse-faced skirt gradually developed into the daily dress of Han Chinese women in the Qing Dynasty through further derivation on the basis of the inherited skirt style of the Ming Dynasty, and became the iconic skirt style of women in the Qing Dynasty. The horse-faced skirt developed fastest in the Qing Dynasty, forming a unique style of decorative structure, and was the basic form of the skirt in the Qing Dynasty.

20th Century

At the beginning of the 20th century, with the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the horse-faced skirt still inherited the loose style, bright colors, and complex craftsmanship of the Qing Dynasty, all of which were gradually sharpened and slowly went from wealthy to declining.

In the 1920s, influenced by the ideas of “democracy and freedom”, Chinese women’s skirts became less and less different from Western women’s skirts, and elements of the traditional women’s skirt gradually disappeared.

As the skirt style continued to be simplified, by the 1930s, the embroidered horse-face skirt was gradually eliminated from the life of people, replaced by the flared skirt, cheongsam, etc.

Horse-Face Skirt Style

1. Ming Dynasty Horse-Face Skirt

The skirt is usually made of seven panels of cloth, with every three and a half panels forming a skirt panel and two panels forming a skirt; the four skirt gates of the skirt, which are overlapped at the front and back, are kept flat, with live pleats on both sides, large and sparse pleats, fixed with a different-colored skirt waist, and ties sewn on both ends of the skirt waist; the skirt hem is wide, and the hem is decorated with a bottom flutter in the form of weaving or embroidery, or a knee glitter.

2. Yuehua Skirt (Lunar Corona Skirt)

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the skirt increased to ten panels of cloth, the waist pleats became denser, and the color of each pleat was different, the pattern inside the pleats was also different, the color was more elegant. When the wind blowed it, the dress more like the lunar corona.

3. Qing Dynasty Horse-Faced Skirt

During the Qing Dynasty, Han Chinese women inherited the Ming Dynasty style of dress, but the decoration of the horse face and skirt became more elaborate, the pleats became more dense, there were as many as a hundred pleats, the skirt became dead pleats, and there were edges between the pleats. The skirt became a dead pleat, and there were hemming between the pleats. The side tuck style, the mougan style and the phoenix tail style were developed.

1). Side Tucks (Pleated Skirt)

The style formed by pleating the skirt on both sides of the horse-faced skirt is called the side tuck style. The Style is a common feature of the Ming and Qing Dynasty horse-faced skirt. In the Qing Dynasty, the pleats of the horse-faced skirt were finer and denser, symmetrical on both sides, neatly arranged and orderly, and the pleats were so fine that “some had dozens of pleats, and some had hundreds of pleats”, commonly known as the pleated skirt.

2). Mougan style (Mougan Skirt)

There is a unique decoration method in the horse-faced skirt of the Qing Dynasty, in which the skirt is made of dark-colored satin cut into thin strips on both sides of the flat skirt and rolled on top of it, with dozens of thin satin dividing the skirt into several parts arranged in an orderly manner, the appearance looks like “Mougan” (A satin trim added to a garment). After wearing the Mougan skirt, the vertical axis of the skirt is the horse’s face, and the two sides of the skirt form a natural symmetrical shape, reflecting a solemn, strict and symmetrical dressing effect. According to the distance between them, there are two kinds of skirt types: “equidistant type” and “non-equidistant type”.

3). Phoenix Style (Phoenix Tail Skirt)

The phoenix tail skirt is a skirt made of dozens of colored strips of fabric with sharp angles cut at the end and fixed side by side at the waist. The phoenix tail skirt should be the most changed style of the horse face skirt, its two sides of the skirt and the front and back of the horse face are no longer continuous fabric, but by the form of long and thin strips of cloth, because the gap between the strips of cloth is large, it is no longer enough to cover the body, so it is not worn alone.

4). Phoenix Tail Side Tuck and Phoenix Tail Mougan style

At the end of the Qing Dynasty, when the skill of making horse-faced skirts reached its peak, two other variations emerged, namely the phoenix-tailed side tuck and the phoenix-tailed mougan, which were actually variations of the phoenix-tailed skirt that incorporated the decoration of the phoenix-tailed skirt with the side tuck or mougan style. The skirt is fixed in such a way that it combines the basic elements of the side tuck, mougan skirt and the phoenix-tailed skirt. This is a new style of the horse-face skirt in terms of form.

4. The Early Republican Horse Face Dress

In the 1920s, the horse-face skirt was fastened with plastic buttons in addition to ties and coiled buttons. In this period, the skirt was slightly shorter than in the Qing Dynasty, the hemline became smaller, the skirt width was reduced, and the decoration was also reduced compared to the Qing Dynasty. Later, the buckle above the waist of the skirt was removed, and the original two skirt waists were merged into one style by the early Qing Dynasty two-piece type merged into one piece. After the Xinhai Revolution, the skirt that evolved afterwards still retained the skirt door and pleats of the horse-faced skirt, but the skirt waist became narrower and even disappeared.

Without a strict form system, the horse-faced skirt was then used more freely, for example, some of them no longer had pleats but only a skirt door. The horse-faced skirt was also inherited into the wedding dress, which was called the red wedding dress, and was the wedding dress for women in the late Qing Dynasty and early Republican period.

In modern times, the elements of the horse-face skirt have been reapplied to fashion, a revival of a classic style and a revival of traditional culture.

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