CHINA:Young people made wealthy by the boom are looking to the recent past for inspiration for cool clothes, writes Clifford Coonanin Beijing
The Communist Party elite may have abandoned the military fatigues and Mao suits in favour of sober blue business suits and striped ties, but out on the streets of Beijing, the imagery of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward live on with the nation's fashionistas and foodies.
The floral patterns on fabrics sold during the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976 now feature in T-shirts by Hong Kong's leading designers.
Street fashion is taking the Sun Yat-sen suit beloved of Mao Zedong - with its sober trousers and austere, four-pocket jacket - and mixing and matching it with trainers, tracksuit bottoms and baseball caps with red stars on the front.
Food-lovers are eating Chairman Mao's Favourite Pork in Cultural Revolution-themed restaurants served by wait staff wearing Red Guard uniforms.
Young people made wealthy by the boom are mining their recent past for inspiration for cool clothes.
"Young people who are working and active now did not live through that period," said Angelica Cheong, editor of the Chinese edition of Vogue. "Lots of artists and designers were born in the 1960s and 1970s but did not experience it. For them it's a novelty. In art and fashion, people seek inspiration from the past. This happens in the West all the time. All things come in cycles."
The gently subversive use of party icons shows how life on the street has moved on in many respects.
Dominic Johnson-Hill runs a company called Plastered which makes T-shirts, posters and merchandise inspired by Communist imagery and retro styling from China in the years before it was opened up to the wider world.
"This time last year, 90 per cent of my customers were foreigners. Now 70 per cent are Chinese. The initial reaction from Chinese people was, 'Why would you put that on a T-shirt?' Then they say, 'Why didn't I think of that?'" he said.
Johnson-Hill (35) came to China from Cornwall as a backpacker in 1993 and never left. He started the T-shirt business two years ago, down a narrow hutong alley in one of the city's last remaining old sections.
Among the shirts he sells are Communist Party images from 1971. Posters show heroic female farm workers, their arms raised to the sun. Students from the Central Academy of Drama, just down the lane, are among his biggest customers.
When British indie pop group the Go! Team played in Beijing recently, they wore Plastered shirts. Li Peng, a singer in the punk band Reflector, is one local celebrity photographed wearing Plastered products. "There is no political dimension. I'm not here to protest. I'm here to celebrate the city and the beauty of the city," he said.
At Shirtflag, another fashion label in cosmopolitan Shanghai, there is a playfulness about its designs incorporating pictures of workers and farmers, as well as Mao icons and Cultural Revolution imagery. They are worn proudly by the fashion soldiers of today on handbags, tracksuit tops and other accessories.
"These old-fashioned clothes are a kind of cultural symbol of the special periods in history, such as the Cultural Revolution and the May 4th Movement," said Shirtflag's founder Ji Ji (35), an avant-garde artist.
"People can separate the political from the aesthetic. In some ways, people use these kind of clothes to resist Western fashion and support Chinese style as well as contemporary Chinese values, just like we use the Chinese sports brand Lining to resist Nike."
David Tang, a style guru in Hong Kong, founded the Shanghai Tang brand that was the first to transform the Sun Yat-sen jacket into something decidedly funkier.
He advised this generation of leaders to consider taking a step back towards the style standards of yesteryear.
Wang Weihua, an art student at Beijing's top Tsinghua University, likes to wear clothes inspired by Communist-era chic.
"I like this kind of style," he said, laughing. "It's a special way of expressing myself . . . There are no political reasons for wearing the clothes.
One of Beijing's most popular restaurants is the Red Capital Club, a beautifully restored courtyard down an atmospheric hutong, which employs original furnishing used by the central government in the 1950s. The lounge cigar divan is made to look like Mao's private meeting room, with original furnishings right down to the antimacassars on two chairs used by Marshal Lin Biao. He died in an aircraft crash after an attempted coup, a death most people believe was orchestrated by Mao. The club has a photograph of Deng Xiaoping taken by his daughter and presented to the club.
A central feature of the menu is, of course, Chairman Mao's Favourite Pork. When then- Tánaiste Mary Harney ate there a couple of years ago, she was driven in an old Communist Party limousine, the Red Flag.
While the relaxed attitude to matters pertaining to the Cultural Revolution and China's post-1949 history is indicative of greater openness in Chinese society, you still have to be careful about getting too ribald about what remains a sensitive area of history.
Beijing authorities have scolded a local communist revolution- themed restaurant for harming national sentiment by painting a sign "liberation zone" pointing the way to its toilets. Times Gone Past, a restaurant featuring waiting staff clad in People's Liberation Army uniforms and decorated with photos of revolutionary heroes and maps of military battles, had taken the "red" theme too far and was ordered to remove the sign, according to the Beijing News.
It said: "Many customers had expressed their dissatisfaction, believing that putting 'liberation zone' on par with a toilet was akin to blaspheming the revolution and was an overly casual use of the term."
The restaurateur said it was "just a joke in keeping with the restaurant's 'red' theme" but the local commerce bureau said it was a "malicious satire detrimental to culture".