The Mao suit was also, supposedly, about classlessness. In reality different cuts demonstrated differing statuses. In the early 1950s salaries were replaced with rationing. While lowest ranking officials had to make do with a Mao suit made from itchy grey cloth, and middle ranking officials from polyester, those who stood at the top of the food chain received suits in more luxurious wool. A higher number of pockets also signified a higher political status and rank.

Following Mao’s death in 1976, the suit’s influence began to wane. China’s opening up and reform reinserted choice into daily life, from work to clothes. But the suit has retained its strong hold on the imagination. China: Through the Looking Glass, a recent exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, addressed Western fantasies about China through fashion. On display were adaptations of the Mao suit; the jacket is the “last sartorial symbol of China,” curator Andrew Bolton told The Washington Post. “Subsequently, no other item of clothing screams China to the West.”

Images of colossal crowds made up “of Red Guards with their little red books marching towards a bigger, better future with the sun [rising] behind them,” have become iconic, says Harriet Evans, a professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. And as those images spread abroad the Mao suit, likewise, infiltrated the Western imagination.

Dreamers and villains

Today – aside from a nostalgic urbanites with large dose of irony – few, if any, young Chinese wear the Mao suit. But Westerners have, over the years, adopted the suit for their own. In the 1960s and ‘70s, when socialism and communism were in vogue, it became fashionable for left-wing intellectuals to wear the Mao suit to signify their political leanings. Before the full horrors of Mao’s reign came to light, the anti-establishment outfit implied an idealistic utopianism in which all were equal.