A rare collection of Chinese cheongsams tells a story of personal style and cultural connection in 20th-century America

(CNN) — Susan Mah knew exactly what she wanted for her version of a “little black dress.” It was the late 1940s in California, and after years of commissioning some of the finest tailors back home in Shanghai and Hong Kong, she had learned a thing or two about making clothes herself.

That’s how one of the most surprising pieces of her wardrobe came to be: a cheongsam, or qipao, with a typical Mandarin collar, short sleeves and knee-length, form-fitting silhouette, but cut from — instead of a sumptuous textile featuring Chinese motifs — a bold print of lime green, Mayan-inspired symbols.

“I think, had she stayed in China… she would have had to dress very conservatively,” speculates her daughter-in-law Chere Lai Mah, 78, who in the decades since Susan’s passing has studied the hundreds of personal garments she left behind, building a picture from oral stories and details she has collected from family members, and even the wearer. “But in Fresno, California she wanted to be interestingly dressed, inspired by Irene Dunne and Barbara Stanwyck, so she started to design these hybrid Chinese American cheongsam,” said Lai Mah, adding that she would go shopping for the “craziest American novelty fabrics.”

Susan, a first generation Chinese American, was a busy mother of 12 children who also helped with the bookkeeping at her family’s record business. Yet she still found time to sew.

“There’s another one with French aristocrats dancing, clowns and roses and polka dots, stripes. She did dozens of these dresses. They are humorous. They are dashing,” said Lai Mah. They were a means of creative expression.

The Mayan revival cheongsam is one of over 70 stunning examples of early- to mid-20th century Chinese clothing displayed in “Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity,” an exhibition opening Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The majority of items on show are from a collection that Lai Mah donated to the museum in 2022 comprising mostly of dresses belonging to Susan, as well as some pieces from her own mother, Li Zhang Huifang, who was a good friend of Susan’s.

“The collection documents this period of incredible change that women are experiencing,” said the show’s guest curator, Michaela Hansen, referring to social liberation and mobility many women experienced following the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912.

Given her relative wealth by the time she was in her mid-30s, Susan, who was born into poverty in Guangdong province, was able to bring all her clothes with her when she left Hong Kong in 1938, amid the Japanese invasion of China. Many other migrants would have struggled to do so — making it even rarer to have such a large cheongsam collection hailing from a single owner (the garments are also exceptionally well-preserved, as “luckily the weather here is perfect, in the Bay Area, without having a fancy air-conditioned storage area,” Lai Mah said).

Hansen said that when Lai Mah approached LACMA, she had “provenance, and she had the stories, she knew who wore what, where they wore it, and that’s very unusual in fashion history, and very unusual for an American institution to have access to Chinese fashion with that story.” Typically, the curator added, museums show Qing dynasty period court dress, contemporary Chinese designers or Western fashion inspired by Chinese design, rather than the wardrobes of everyday women.

“This fills the gap of something that’s hard to collect — and important to collect,” Hansen said.

A Chinese American story

Lai Mah, an artist who has studied textiles in-depth and authored a book about her family’s history, remembers the first cheongsam Susan gave her in 1971.

The turquoise piece, featuring ornate gold motifs over a silk brocade, was “charming and cozy,” Lai Mah said. But she never wore it, instead using it as the inspiration for a series of sculptures that she later made as a student at UC Berkeley.

The artist smiles as she recalls why Susan gifted it to her. “She had also given one of her other daughters-in-law her fur coat, but that daughter-in-law made it into a lap blanket, and maybe that spurred her to think that she might give her pieces to another daughter-in-law.”

Eventually, Lai Mah became the caretaker of Susan’s entire wardrobe. And because cheongsams are custom-made — uniquely reflecting the tastes of their wearer and collaboration with tailors — the collection reveals how Susan’s style evolved from a young girl’s to that of “an older, confident, established matriarch in the United States.”

That confidence — and the apparent embrace of both her Chinese and American cultural identities — oozes through one particular family photograph. It shows Susan casually smoking a cigarette in a cheongsam that features dancing clowns, its trim made from one of her older, traditional dresses from the 1920s, paired with Frank More heels and a strawberry motif sweater.

Fresno was racially segregated, with a diverse immigrant population living on its West side. But its Chinatown became home to a large and vibrant Chinese American community, and where new migrants across the US may have felt the need to assimilate and adopt to Western clothing, Susan and others there proudly wore their cheongsams, preserving an important connection to home.

West Fresno “was a very mixed, diverse community in the 1950s,” recalled Lai Mah. “We grew up eating tamales at Christmas, Armenian lamb burgers, Filipino pancit, Japanese mochi and shaved ice, German bierocks.

Those who could afford it sent their orders from the US, with Chinese relatives helping to finalize details with tailors in-person. Diaspora still kept up with trends, as evident with the Mayan print-inspired cheongsam that Susan later sewed herself — its symmetrical, double-sided openings reflecting a style popularized by China’s charismatic first lady Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.

People put on cheongsams for special occasions, whether family celebrations or fundraising in the local Chinatown to help support China’s war efforts against the Japanese during World War II. (Though many people in Asian diasporas would become “quiet Americans” during the McCarthy era to avoid standing out.)

Had the Li and Mah families not immigrated to the US, they would have faced the chaos and instability of that conflict, the Chinese Civil War and, later, the Cultural Revolution. The qipaos on show at LACMA, many of which were made in China before being brought to the US, would likely have been destroyed, along with anything else perceived as elite. A piece of fashion history would have been lost — another reason why Lai Mah’s collection is extraordinary. “They were meant to be saved,” she said.

A singular collection

Lai Mah decided to give the “heart” of her collection to LACMA during the Covid-19 pandemic. She was partly motivated by the threat of California wildfires, while also feeling that, as she was getting older, it was time to “find them a proper house.” At one point, she had dedicated an entire room to cheongsams.

At the museum, the garments will be dressed on 3D-printed mannequins made in collaboration with fashion designer Jason Wu, who wanted to approach them as “not only display tools but as modern sculptures: abstract yet deeply human,” he wrote in the exhibition catalog, adding: “Their soft white finish carries a yellow undertone, a quiet but deliberate nod to our Chinese complexion.”

Besides Susan and Li’s wardrobes, Lai Mah also donated items she had bought herself, including a lamé qipao that she found in Fresno that was “so unusual.” There’s little information about its origins, though Lai Mah believes it was created in the US or China in around 1928.

Hansen, the curator, said she has never seen anything like it. The lamé fabric was made using “real metal threads and metal wefts,” and was then screen-printed, she said. “But the screen-printing can’t adhere to the metallic threads and so it creates this abstract pattern on top of the woven pattern, which is pretty unique.”

Elsewhere in the exhibition, another lamé qipao, this one from the 1940s, shows how technology advances, with the fabric manufacturers by then able to dye the metallic threads, Hansen added.

Supplemented with LACMA’s own items, the exhibition presents the garments as unique time capsules that reveal trends, new textiles and cutting-edge techniques, and the global influences shaping the cities in which they were made.

“I wanted to challenge an idea — that you can see sometimes percolating in the field of fashion history — that Chinese fashion was somehow stagnant, because it’s not at all true, and the objects contradict that completely,” said Hansen.

“I also wanted to really highlight how integral individual women were in constructing their own images with these garments, with their wardrobes. They’ve made intentional decisions about what they look like and the fabrics, and particularly in the Chinese tailoring style, how they fit and how they’re worn.”

While cheongsams are still made and continue to evolve, with new generations of designers injecting fresh, contemporary twists, Lai Mah said today’s tailors just miss a little something from the classic cut.

“There was a severe elegance.”

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“Fashioning Chinese Women: Empire to Modernity” is on from June 12 to October 12 at LACMA.