---
node: fashion_tang
type: fashion
slug: tang_dynasty_fashion
title: "Fashion in the Tang dynasty"
lead: "Tang dress was open, colorful and cosmopolitan, enriched by Silk Road contact: women wore the high-waisted ruqun with a gauze shawl, and officials the round-collar robe with rank marked by color."
published: 2026-07-28
updated: 2026-08-15
image_file: tang_dynasty_fashion.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Court_Ladies_Preparing_Newly_Woven_Silk.jpg"
image_author: "Zhang Xuan (Song-dynasty copy)"
image_license: "Public domain"
change: "Deepened all three sections for SEO deepening wave 10 (thinnest cluster pages)"
previous_hash: "e72ba14aff2dae433531f061e718f855235a606af1e31c865104a7cb0e3fa915"
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---

## Overview

Tang dress is the most cosmopolitan in Chinese history, and the reason is geography: Chang'an sat at the eastern end of the Silk Road and held communities of Sogdians, Persians, Turks and others. Foreign cut, foreign cloth and foreign taste entered the wardrobe of the capital and were treated as fashionable rather than as barbarian.

## Key garments and style

Women wore the ruqun — a short jacket over a long skirt tied high on the chest, sometimes above the bust — with the pibo, a long gauze stole carried over the arms, and often the banbi, a half-sleeved overgarment. Colours were strong, necklines by the eighth century were low, and the fashionable figure grew fuller, as the tomb figurines and the paintings show.

The striking thing is what women were permitted. Tang women rode, played polo and appeared in public in men's dress and in Central Asian hu clothing — narrow sleeves, trousers, boots and pointed caps — and were painted doing it.

Officials wore the round-collar robe with the futou, rank read from colour in a fixed order, purple and scarlet at the top through green and blue below.

## Transition

The Song reacted against all of it, favouring a narrow, muted and covered line that read as discipline where the Tang had read as confidence.