Bent over a magenta chiffon fabric, an elderly Hong Kong tailor wearing thick glasses meticulously stitched on embroidered butterflies, working to transform the shimmering material into an elegant, high-collared Chinese dress known as a cheongsam.
Aged 88, Yan Kar-man (殷家萬) is one of Hong Kong’s oldest master tailors of the cheongsam — literally “long clothes” in Cantonese — a dress recognizable for its form-fitting silhouette which was famously featured in Wong Kar-wai’s film In the Mood for Love.
Experts say the silver-haired tailor is among about 10 remaining makers of cheongsam in Hong Kong, which in the mid-1960s used to have about 1,000, according to records from the Shanghai Tailoring Workers General Union.
Photo: AFP
However, after dressing generations of women ranging from housewives to movie stars like Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) and Shu Qi (舒淇), Yan has decided to hang up his measuring tape soon — by the end of this month at the earliest.
“I can’t see clearly — my eyes are not working well, and neither am I. I have to retire,” he said as he stooped closer to his sewing machine to tack on an embroidered border on the dress.
With about 10 more dresses to finish, Yan hesitated to give an exact closing day for his tiny workshop located in the bustling Hong Kong commercial district of Jordan.
Photo: AFP
Evolved from the long robes worn by Manchurian people in China’s Qing Dynasty, the cheongsam has dominated the wardrobes of ordinary Chinese women for much of the 20th century since it was popularized in Shanghai in the 1920s.
Its high-neck collars, knee-length slits and streamlined fits evoked a sense of city glamour, and by the 1960s the dress was everywhere in Hong Kong.
“Women would wear them to shop in wet markets,” recalled Yan, whose workshop walls are plastered with photos of beauty pageant queens wearing his dresses.
Some of his celebrity customers have even reached out for major life events — like Liza Wang (汪明荃), a Hong Kong diva nicknamed “Big Sister” in entertainment circles, who has been his client for three decades.
“I didn’t know it was for her wedding when I made her a dress with one of her scarves and turned the scraps into a tie for her groom,” Yan said.
Born in Jiangsu Province, China, north of Shanghai, Yan was 13 when his uncle brought him to Hong Kong in 1949 to work as an apprentice in a workshop, where the school dropout was discovered to be a young talent.
At that time, the trade for cheongsam was so common and stable that Yan recalled a plain design would cost “just a few [Hong Kong] dollars.”
Western fashion became popular after World War II, and the rise of the garment manufacturing sector in Hong Kong squeezed the cheongsam out of the fashion limelight while pushing tailoring workshops out of business.
Today, the traditional technique to make the dress is “critically endangered,” said Brenda Li, an adviser to the Hong Kong Cheongsam Association.
“Hong Kong’s cheongsam-making has developed its own style and tradition in the past century, merging skills of dimensional cutting from the West,” she said.
“Few people still wear and care about it, but we want to preserve it no matter how niche it has become because it’s part of our culture,” she added.
Although cheongsam-making technique has been recognized as part of Hong Kong and China’s cultural heritage, Yan said the withered trade offers little chance to pass on his craft.
“You can’t make a living by making qipao because it’s no longer the trend,” Yan said, using the Mandarin word for the dress.
The master — who also teaches at a learning center near his shop — said his students were “far from ready to make real clothes for clients.”
Nowadays, orders typically come from older women who need a statement dress to attend their children’s weddings, and each piece takes Yan weeks to finish and costs several thousand Hong Kong dollars.
“How many old clients are still out there, and how many pieces of such detailed work can you make every month?” Yan asked rhetorically. “My generation is mostly gone.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including