The Mao Suit and Bond villains
Boy wearing a Mao Suit on Kim Il Sung square, Pyongyang, North Korea, February 2017.
This boy is wearing a so called Zhongshan Suit or “Mao Suit” or as Koreans would call it a “closed collar, Western-style garment”. The legends say that Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the first provisional president of the Republic of China, wanted to create a national dress in the early 1900s. The idea of the design was to project a new, confident China, by combining eastern and western styles. The dress was popularized when Mao Zedong rose to power in 1949, linking it to communism, mostly because it was “one of the only acceptable things to wear”.
In the West this suit has been associated with pure evil - like Bond supervillains! See Ernst Stavro Blofeld and Franz Oberhauser.
“Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.”
