Language Log

18 Comments

1. Rubrick said,

   June 5, 2015 @ 8:09 pm

   Adorning a cocktail dress with a tie must have been quite a bold move at the time. ;-)

2. Laura Morland said,

   June 5, 2015 @ 9:07 pm

   Delightful essay — even though I know no Chinese, I was impelled to read it all the way through.

   It merits publication in a journal, and not simply here at Language Log!

3. Jeff W said,

   June 5, 2015 @ 11:25 pm

   Regardless of where Dior may have seen this divine specimen of calligraphy, he immortalized Zhang Xu's eccentric prescription by putting it on his oddly named cocktail dress.
   …
   If this dress were ever worn, and even now when it is on display at the Met, I can only imagine how many people who would have thought that it is "saying" something profound.

   The word "Quiproquo" in the name of the dress might come from the Italian phrase qui pro quo which is given the meanings here of “an understanding of something that is not correct” or “putting the wrong interpretation on.”

   If that’s the case, the name of the dress might be, in fact, a meta-comment on the dress itself and its design.

   This quote from the South China Morning Post gives some additional context about the exhibit generally:

   To put a name to it, the show is dealing with the concept of "orientalism" – a negative term that describes a false, exoticised view of China – and its imagistic counterpart, "chinoiserie".

   The show's title, "China Through The Looking Glass", a direct reference to Lewis Carroll's novel, was chosen to reflect the theme of misrepresentation, according to Andrew Bolton, the curator of The Met's Costume Institute: "We took our cue from Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There – which was an imaginary alternative universe.

   "In this world, everything is topsy-turvy and back to front. Like Alice's make-believe world, the China reflected in the fashions in the exhibition is a fiction, a fabulous invention offering an alternative reality with a dreamlike nature. The show is not about China per se, but about a reflected fantasy of China," Bolton says.

   [And thank you, Victor Mair, for the thoroughly illuminating post. I agree entirely with Laura Morland.]

4. Jeff W said,

   June 5, 2015 @ 11:58 pm

   This official video has gallery views of the "China: Through the Looking Glass" exhibition, with a thoughtful narration by Andy Bolton, the exhibition’s curator. The "Quiproquo" cocktail dress is shown at the 4:32 point in the video.

5. Laura Morland said,

   June 6, 2015 @ 2:43 am

   @ Jeff W –

   Occam's razor would suggest that since Christian Dior was French (very French indeed; I just learned quite a bit about his life in the new documentary "Dior and I"), he was more likely using the French word "quiproquo": "mistake, misunderstanding". Ex.: "C'est un quiproquo" = "We're at cross-purposes".
   See: http://www.wordreference.com/fren/quiproquo

   Your point holds, however, whether in Italian or in French!

6. Jeff W said,

   June 6, 2015 @ 4:28 am

   Thank you, Laura Morland. Yes, I agree with you, once again—that explanation is definitely better.

7. Victor Mair said,

   June 6, 2015 @ 6:51 am

   @Laura Morland @Jeff W

   Thank you for the compliments on this post.

   Laura suggests, "It merits publication in a journal, and not simply here at Language Log!"

   I truly appreciate the sentiment, but Language Log has become my main focus of academic research. I can spend a few hours, days, or weeks on a post like this one, put it out and reach tens of thousands of readers instantly, and receive immediate feedback from the most knowledgeable people on earth, wherever they may be located. For a normal journal article, I would probably spend three to six months or more to write it, wait three to six months or more for the review process to be completed, then wait six months to eighteen months or more for actual printing and publication. All together, it often takes years to write and publish a journal article.

   I have had a long career in which I have published hundreds of articles and reviews in all the major journals of my field and have published dozens of books from the best presses. But I can tell you that nothing is as intellectually thrilling as to write a Language Log post and receive comments from some of the smartest, best informed people in the world.

   Times have changed, and I'm ever so grateful that I lived long enough to experience this new mode of sharing information and ideas.

8. Victor Mair said,

   June 6, 2015 @ 8:17 am

   From a colleague:

   When Zhang Xu says "冷热俱有益," he means the Dahuang formula should be good for either "cold" or "hot" (pathological bodily) conditions. Here, "cold" condition and "hot" condition are part of the TCM parlance (i.e., argot), which generally refer to overexposure to cold or heat (They may not necessarily refer to temperature-related cold or heat but may also refer to metaphysical cold or heat, such as caused by overeating food items of a "cold" nature or "hot" nature.).

9. Victor Mair said,

   June 6, 2015 @ 11:33 am

   From a colleague:

   Adorning a work of haute couture with Dutong tie reflects the designer's modernist / postmodernist aesthetics.

10. Bobbie said,

    June 6, 2015 @ 7:24 pm

    Rhubarb and soda was an antacid sold in pharmacies in the U. S., manufactured by the pharmaceutical giant Squibb. Worked great. It was composed of rhubarb and bicarbonate of soda.

11. Jeff W said,

    June 7, 2015 @ 1:33 am

    Here, in the International Business Times, is an interview with Bryn Mawr College’s Associate Professor of History of Art Homay King, whose book Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier.

    ⁂

    I was trying to get a feel for what people knew about the Quiproquo dress and when they knew it.

    Starting with the obvious, it seems incredibly unlikely that Christian Dior, who was employing the rubbings, would have been unaware of the origin and general meaning of the calligraphy, especially if it’s as well-known as Victor Mair says it is.

    On the other hand, someone like Richard Martin, then-curator of the Met’s Costume Institute, who wrote the book that accompanied the Met’s “Christian Dior” exhibition (December 1996–March 1997) marking the fiftieth anniversary of Christian Dior’s “New Look,”—who, you would think, would know at least the basics about it—very obviously did not:

    In a dress unusual for Dior, Japanese characters are printed in black on a white ground…Dior's avowal of the European past is paramount. In this instance, the use of a Japanism in the form of Japanese script presented in poetic form is wholly superficial; the thinking is Western. This textile was originally shown as another model in the same collection, "Crimoire . " Presumably it was only at the initiative of the client that Dior created this slightly complicated version of "Quiproquo" from the fabric of the other dress.

    Ouch.

    And what of Mrs Bryon C Foy, who gave the dress as a gift to the Met in 1953?

    Here’s a bit about her:

    The daughter of automobile maker, Walter Chrysler, Thelma Chrysler Foy married another automobile executive Byron Cecil Foy in 1924 and pursued the role of a dazzling New York socialite. She would be on the list of “best-dressed women” from 1935 on, for the next 20 years (although few, perhaps, recognized her effortless combination of classic sartorial elegance and timeless pharmacological guidance).

    Mrs Foy, her father's biographer would note, “was a very fastidious person” and she had a bit pf a temper—she once grabbed a pair of scissors and tried to stab one of the assistants at Hattie Carnegie’s dress shop who had annoyed her. By 1953, becoming ill with leukemia (although she had yet to know the cause), she gave the Quiproquo dress to the Met, one of the 111 dresses and hats she would donate, according to this (apparently unofficial) reprint of a Vogue piece about her.

    The following year, her illness progressing, she and her husband scaled back a bit, moving from their 51-room, five-story townhouse at East Ninety-third Street to an apartment in 740 Park Avenue, which has been called “the world’s richest apartment building.”* (According to this 2014 Business Insider piece, it’s still pretty exclusive—you need to show at least a liquid net worth of $100 million to even be considered for admission  but wealth alone might not be enough; reportedly, Barbra Streisand, whose net worth is estimated at 3½ times that, did not make the cut.) There, if this quote from Wesley Towner’s book, The Elegant Auctioneers, is any indication, the Foys spent quiet evenings at home, as, no doubt, so many of us would: x-raying the family porcelain so that any piece the butler might have broken and then had surreptitiously mended would not go undetected. Mrs Foy died in August, 1957. (Christian Dior died a little over two months later.)

    Does all that point definitively to what Mrs Foy knew or did not know about the Quoproquo dress? Obviously, not exactly. But since haute couture requires that the items be made-to-order and handcrafted to the client’s wishes, I suspect that she knew close to as much as Christian Dior did. Besides, Dior would likely not want to risk a stab to the hand if Mrs Foy were “annoyed” by any nondisclosure that she later discovered— and very little, it seems, escaped her and her husband’s—at times ultra-spectral—gaze.

    *The Foys’ apartment—17B—was next occupied, with two additional floors, by John D., Jr. Rockefeller till 1971 (pictures of how it was furnished during his time are here) and later, by videogame magnate Greg Fishbach (think Mortal Kombat) and his wife Linda, who lived there for 17 years before unloading the place, in 2011, on developer William Lie Zeckendorf for a cool $27 million and trading down to a $10.75 million pad in a brand-new building with hand-carved pear trees at the entrance.

12. Laura Morland said,

    June 7, 2015 @ 5:17 am

    Great research! I clicked on the link to "740 Park" without intending to, and I was riveted. The original owner of the "quiproquo" dress, Thelma Chrysler Foy, is described in that source as being voted *the* best-dressed woman in America (not just among the best-dressed) for 20 years running, largely due to being a grand "consommatrice" of French haute couture.

    I agree that Thelma Foy would have been likely to have insisted on knowing every detail about a such a remarkable dress. And it seems that she could have used a regimen of Chinese medicine, whether "mistaken" or not. According to her niece, "the whole family was insane… and the most intense of all was Thelma. She was absolutely bizarre, self-absorbed, and fashion-conscious."

    "She drove couturiers insane if things were not exactly as she wanted," states her father's biographer. "She was a *very* fastidious person."

13. Victor Mair said,

    June 7, 2015 @ 6:58 am

    More marvelous research by Jeff and Laura!

    So it turns out that this fantastic dress was the brainchild of Thelma Foy. For an obsessive-compulsive person, it's highly unlikely that she would have been unaware of the content of Zhang Xu's piece; she had probably seen it in some exhibition in the course of her museum going. And let's not forget Bobbie's comment just above: Americans in those days were taking rhubarb and bicarbonate of soda. Moreover, Zhang Xu's wild calligraphy, both in content and form, well reflected Thelma's physical and psychological feelings.

    I'm going to look into the history of the exhibition of this rubbing in its various exemplars.

14. Victor Mair said,

    June 7, 2015 @ 7:24 am

    From my colleague, Chi-ming Yang, a specialist on Chinese influence on European culture during the 18th century:

    =====

    Great piece and dialogue! I taught a unit on the magic of rhubarb to Europeans in the 18th century, and in that class one of my students also did a final blog project on “Haute Chinoiserie” and featured the Met exhibit heavily. I have yet to see it—have you gone? Another former student sent me this hilarious bit about it:

    "this picture of Rihanna's dress from the Met Gala, which the Chinese blogosphere ridiculed as looking just like 煎饼 sold on the streets in China (ironically, it is one of the few dresses actually made by a Chinese designer).”

    =====

15. Nuno said,

    June 7, 2015 @ 8:14 am

    Any chance the name is a pun on qipao?

16. Victor Mair said,

    June 7, 2015 @ 10:19 am

    From Petya Andreeva:

    I managed to see the MET exhibition before I left for Europe and I was fascinated by the pieces. The Dior piece was really interesting. I am aware of the unsigned Stomachache Letter, a reengraving of a MIng date, being part of the Forest of Steles Museum (Beilin Museum) in Xi'an. I actually remember reading about this in Amy McNair's The Upright Brush (1998) (the information is on page 24).

    I did not find any translations in English of the Bellyache letter.

17. Jeff W said,

    June 7, 2015 @ 3:34 pm

    @ Victor Mair

    …she had probably seen [Zhang Xu's piece] in some exhibition in the course of her museum going

    And, in addition, here’s a reference from a dissertation about C.T. Loo [Loo Ching-Tsai], “the preeminent dealer of Chinese art and artifacts for the first half of the twentieth century,” according to the Smithsonian National Portrait gallery:

    With the rise of prominence of Chinese art in the West in the 1930s and the 1940s, the acquisition and display of Chinese objects by elite American women in a domestic setting was increasingly associated with social prestige and fashion. The Art News report of [C.T.] Loo’s 1947 Song ceramic exhibition offers a case in point. As an advertisement for this exhibition, the report showed that Loo’s major clients were aristocratic, cosmopolitan American women. In the first case, Mrs. Byron C. Foy, wife of the vice-president of Chrysler Corporation, placed her Chinese porcelain collection in her French eighteenth- century room with a Renoir masterpiece [citation omitted].

    So Thelma Foy, like other elite American women at that time, was pretty involved in acquiring Chinese objects and probably had some working knowledge about them, especially given her compulsive nature. It’s tempting to think that she knew full well about the meaning of the text—the “Bellyache letter” is, after all, how it is popularly known—and, while appreciating the exuberance of Zhang’s calligraphy, enjoyed pulling one over on those who did not (which is to say, nearly everyone).

    @ Laura Morland

    Great research! I clicked on the link to "740 Park" without intending to, and I was riveted.

    Thank you, Laura, for your kind words! I was actually trying to find some indication of what Mrs Foy said or thought about the dress, or, perhaps a picture of her in it, and came up empty-handed. So what you are seeing are the fruits of my colossal failure.

    I included the links (as I tend to do in my comments) so that people can assess for themselves the sources I’m referring to—because, well, what the heck do I know?—but I’ll concede that that practice, given the possibility of inadvertent clicking, is not without some attendant risk.

18. Robert D. Mowry said,

    June 10, 2015 @ 2:41 pm

    Very few Western museums have collections of Chinese rubbings. I believe the other major collection of Chinese rubbings in the U.S.—i.e., apart from the Warner rubbings in the Rubel Collection of Harvard’s Fine Arts Library—is at the Field Museum in Chicago. I don’t know whether or not any libraries have rubbings. It would be worthwhile to see if the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Columbia University Library, the Yale University Library, the Princeton University Library, and the Hoover Institute at Stanford have such collections. You could also check to see whether or not the Freer and Sackler Galleries (Smithsonian Institution), Washington, DC, might have a collection; I doubt it, but I’m not sure.

    To the best of my knowledge none of the Warner rubbings has been exhibited or published. I can’t say for sure, but I really doubt it.

    Now, most of the Warner rubbings have simple paper covers that suggest that they were purchased from a bookstore or an antique store in China. I am certain that Langdon Warner did not make the rubbings, just as I’m certain that they are not one-off rubbings. Rather, I’m certain that those rubbings likely were produced in some quantity in the 1920s and 1930s and sold inexpensively in commercial establishments (i.e., in bookstores, antique stores, perhaps even in traditional art-supply stores, along with brushes, ink, inkstones, and other materials of interest and use to calligraphers). If my assumption is correct, then there must have been many copies of the Zhang Xu rubbing in circulation—at least in China, if not in the West. Keep in mind that in his travels in China, Warner very much followed the lead of earlier Western “explorers” like Edouard Chavannes, Paul Pelliot, and Aurel Stein, etc. In that context, I suspect that in buying rubbings, Warner likely was following the lead of Pelliot, Stein, and others. If so, then there presumably are related collections of rubbings in England, France, and perhaps Germany, likely in the British Library, the British Museum, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Musée Guimet (Paris), etc. If so, then Christian Dior likely saw a similar—virtually identical—rubbing in Europe, presumably at the Bibliothèque nationale or perhaps in the Guimet. I really think that is a much more likely hypothesis to begin with than to think he might have seen the Harvard rubbing. And I’m sure many rubbings must have been prepared from the stone engraving over the centuries, with many of them in circulation in China, Europe, and the U.S. in the twentieth century.

    By the way, do we know where the stone engraving is (from which the rubbings were prepared)? I think that is a very important question. Do we know why it was made?

    My friend Carlos Chan—a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine who lives in Portugal and who is also interested in Chinese art, calligraphy, culture, and architecture—confirmed my suspicion that a rubbing of Zhang Xu’s text was included in the late tenth-century Chunhuage Tie collection of rubbings. That being the case, it is a very famous text—i.e., famous for the quality of its calligraphy—so that it must have been known and “venerated” in China in all succeeding periods. Here’s the text that Carlos passed along:

    肚痛帖(局部). 傳唐張旭書。為草書“忽肚痛不可堪”云云六行。書法勁健，富變化，與《淳化閣帖》、《大觀帖》中所謂張旭書者，趣致殊异。對其書者有异說。

    Also, searching Google for related rubbings, I found a lot of references.

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