ABSTRACT
During the Cold War, tailoring in Japan and China followed different lines of development. This chapter shows the writings and professional activities of tailors in China and Japan in the first half of the twentieth century show that the technical challenges of producing the new styles of garment met with a range of local responses. The social history of clothing in East Asia sheds light on the cultural contexts within which Chinese and Japanese tailors acquired and demonstrated their skills in Western garment making. The various systems promoted through tailoring academies and publications in Britain and the United States met the interest of Japanese tailors in how to draft patterns to suit the body shapes of particular clients. In Japan also, despite a few professional schools of tailoring in the 1920s, it was mostly the case that tailoring was taught through an apprenticeship system.
