Twill weave polyester coat, designed by Vivienne Tam, Hong Kong, spring/summer 1995, made in 1998

Woman's full-length polyester coat. It is made of figured fabric, the twill ground is self patterned with a chequerboard design of Chairman Mao in red and black. The design was made with one grey warp, and two wefts; one red and one black.

The coat is front-fastening with seven plastic buttons. It has long and straight sleeves, a turned down collar and two front pockets with flaps. The coat is lined with a synthetic black plain weave material.

Given by the designer

Vivienne Tam, a Guangzhou-born and Hong Kong-educated, Chinese fashion designer working in New York, introduced distinctively Chinese imagery into her designs from the 1990s. The V&A acquired several pieces from Tam's 'Mao Collection' of spring, 1995. Pictures of Mao Zedong were ubiquitous during his lifetime and, after his death in 1976, they persisted. Some were worked anew and used in contexts that were sometimes controversial and contradictory. Vivienne Tam collaborated with Zhang Hongtu, an artist who first depicted Mao in his paintings in 1987. She emblazoned the Chairman's features onto coloured T-shirts and dresses. The coat give a new twist to the jacquard pictures of Mao that were woven in such huge quantities in the People's Republic during the middle decades of the twentieth century, several of which are in the V&A's collection. The designer herself says that these bi-coloured pieces symbolise the positive and negative effects of Mao's regime and she recalls her first encounter with the People's Republic of China, in the late 1970s and 1980s, as very different from the one she was used to in Hong Kong . On this particular Tam coat, the Mao image itself has not been much altered and, consequently, its use on women's high fashion garments makes a brazen juxtaposition. The repeating design on heavyweight polyester was printed in Hong Kong. The designer recalls the difficulty of finding a factory to carry out the work and the secrecy with which the finished product was delivered to her. The perceived controversy surrounding its manufacture perhaps served to heighten the collection's appeal and there is no doubt that the fabric, rather than the tailoring, is the paramount feature of this coat.

This coat was originally produced in 1997 for the Christmas window display at the department store Barney's in New York.

There is a suggestion that this is from Tam's 'Mao Collection' of 1995 but may be from 1998; other Tam clothes are FE.44 to FE.51-1998

This woman's full-length coat was part of the spring/summer 1995 fashion collection of Chinese-born designer Vivienne Tam. The collection was inspired in part by the early 1990s Political Pop Art Movement in china. It is made of polyester and its design consists of repeated images of Chairman Mao who was the leader of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death in 1976. After his death, Mao became a pop icon and his face was used by artists and designers, both in China and elsewhere.

FE.43-1998