Be Kind

Looking to get into the Taobao shops? These are some good jumping-off points! For those starting out in hanfu, looking for your first set or first few sets can be kind of intimidating. There are so many options, and so many place you can get them from—how do you choose something trustworthy and in your budget? hanfuhouse is a great place to start, but for those who want to expand to looking for hanfu on the taobao market, fear not, for I’ve compiled a list of what I think are the best taobao shops for beginners to start shopping at! - Luo Shen Ji ($) Full of classic silhouettes and light, flowy patterns with vibrant pastel color schemes and layers of sheer fabric, is a great option for someone’s first or second hanfu, if you want to start out with something a bit more basic. You can find lots of great ethereal and cute choices in this shop with some pretty hard-to-beat price points, and it’s a perfect place to get some foundations down with the most basic silhouettes—ruqun, aoqun, yuanlingpao, etc.—before you start expanding into the more niche kinds of hanfu. Some sets are more expensive than others, but…

First installment of the Hanfu in Components series is up! As a reminder, if you haven’t already, check out the introductory article to best find out how to use this guide, otherwise some things might not make sense to you. If you’ve done that already, charge on forward! To kick off the series, this is a brief article explaining how exactly we’re going to break down hanfu into its basic components. We’re still in the introductory stages here, but bear with me and we’ll get to the fun stuff soon.   WHAT MAKES HANFU, HANFU? What defines /han4 fu2/hanfu? What sets it apart from everyone else? How do we know when something is truly hanfu, as opposed to hanfu-inspired? These questions can be kind of scary when you first look at them, scared of making a mistake—don’t worry, it’s actually pretty simple! the shape of the fabric pieces and how the pieces are sewed together, not the ‘pattern’ printed on the surface of a piece of fabric or color) that we use today to make hanfu. So everything that counts as hanfu, we have a real historical artifact to back up its construction. Sometimes different types of hanfu are even…