Snack: Shanghai popcorn was a popular treat for children in the 1980s. provided to china daily

DIY fashion

While the children were scratching their heads over their snack choices, the sort of dilemma the adults faced often involved new clothes. The 1980s was an era when everyone in the country wore deep blue jackets. Chinese New Year was the only time that the city’s frustrated fashionistas had a reason to create something different.

It has always been a tradition in Shanghai to have a new piece of clothing made for the new year because we believe that this will usher in good luck. You would need to, at the very least, get a new pair of cotton-filled shoes.

When society was gradually opened up to the outside world, Shanghainese women quietly resumed their pursuit of fashion. Their first acquisition was often a traditional brocade cotton-filled jacket featuring beautiful but complicated buttons. It was a refined form of the qipao which had disappeared from the streets since the Cultural Revolution which took place from 1966 to 1976.

Women would head to Nanjing Road, the major shopping street in the city at that time, to select fabrics before returning home to show off their new purchases. Brave fashion gurus often picked bright peacock blue while more conservative women would select rose red. I still remember how the vivid colors and intricate patterns of the smooth brocade stood out in the center of the dimly lit home.

Thrifty housewives, like my mother, used cheap cotton to make winter clothes for their children. In an old photo from when I was three, I can be seen dressed in a very puffy coat and pants, all stuffed with cotton, that made me look like a huge melon sprouting from the soil.

Later, such tailor-made jackets were quickly replaced by mass-produced down jackets which were lighter and easier to wash. Ironically, as Shanghai society started to embrace the international fashion scene, the city quickly lost these unique brocade colors that were definitive of a generation.