The Decline of Hong Kong Cheongsam: The 1970s and 1980s

By the mid-1960s, garment factories had begun to flourish and Western-style ready-to-wear clothes of all sorts had become more widely available on the market. In contrast, commissioning a cheongsam at a tailor’s shop was time-consuming and expensive, and the cheongsam industry went into decline. The increased variety of jobs that could be found also led to a drastic drop in the number of young men seeking an apprenticeship in the tailoring trade, and the cheongsam tailors received another big blow when many wealthy patrons emigrated after the 1967 riots in Hong Kong. All these factors played a part as the cheongsam industry fell into sharp decline.

Although the cheongsam was no longer in vogue in Hong Kong in the 1970s and 1980s, it retained a small group of supporters and was still the preferred attire for women on special occasions. There were also women in the upper middle class who took to putting on a cheongsam as their daily wear. Some leading women executives, both at the public and private sectors, also chose to don the dress to reinforce their image. Many film and TV actresses and singers continued to wear the cheongsam on stage and at public events, and the cheongsam was also one of the designated costumes to be worn by contestants in local beauty pageants. The cheongsam of this period was an exquisite dress that came with an expensive tailoring fee. People in Hong Kong thus gradually associated the cheongsam with high-society women, further elevating the image of the dress