Woman's jacket and skirt, black and white jacquard-woven polyester, designed by Vivienne Tam, Hong Kong, spring/summer 1995

Woman's suit, comprising a matching jacket and skirt, made of polyester fabric, and printed in black and white with repeat images of Mao Zedong (1893- 1976), who was a Chinese communist leader and founder of the People's Republic of China.

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/summer 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 suit here gives 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, some of which are also 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 these particular Tam clothes, 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 outfit.

Although this probably comes from Tam's 'Mao Collection' of 1995 there is also a suggestion that it is from 1998.

This woman’s black and white suit was part of the spring/summer 1995 fashion collection of the Chinese-born designer Vivienne Tam. The polyester fabric, from which the suit is made, is covered with repeating images of Chairman Mao (1893-1976), leader of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death. Its design was inspired by a jacquard woven silk portrait of Chairman Mao produced during the Cultural Revolution in China. After his death, Mao became a pop icon and his face was used by artists and designers, both in China and elsewhere.

FE.45:1, 2-1998