Is This A Man Or Woman

  Early Western travelers who visited India, Persia, Turkey, or China, would frequently remark on the absence of change in fashion in those countries. In 1609, the secretary of the Japanese shōgun bragged inaccurately to a Spanish visitor that Japanese clothing had not changed in over a thousand years. However, these conceptions of non-Western clothing undergoing little, if any, evolution is generally held to be untrue; for instance, there is considerable evidence in Ming China of rapidly changing fashions in Chinese clothing. Similar changes in clothing can be seen in Japanese clothing between the Genroku period and the later centuries of the Edo period (1603-1867), during which time clothing trends switched from flashy and expensive displays of wealth to subdued and subverted ones.