Topic summary
Cheongsam
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Qipao.
Further transformation
Consumer culture rose as Western and Chinese merchants cooperated to move towards early capitalism. People eagerly sought a more modernized dress style and transformed the old cheongsam to suit new tastes. Newer forms featured slender and tight-fitting pencil cuts and deep necks, which is different from the early cheongsam. High-class courtesans and celebrities in the city welcomed the tight-fitting cheongsam. It was at this time the word cheongsam became well known in English. In Shanghainese, it was first known as zansae for 'long dress', rendered in Mandarin as chángshān and in Cantonese as chèuhngsāam. Then, the spoken Cantonese renditions of 長衫 was borrowed into English as "cheongsam".