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In the back-and-forth about who wore what best for the red carpet opening of the Met's summer exhibition, China: Through the Looking Glass, I found myself scrambling to find pictures of the stars whose style I admired. The theme was chosen to celebrate the museum's Asian Art department centenary, but realistically, it was also so global fashion brands and the American media brands that cover them could appeal to (and tap into) a share of the growing wealth and consumerism in China. A heavily hyped so-called Oscars-of-fashion party, specifically for a show about the influence of Chinese culture on Western fashion over the centuries, would seem the perfect opportunity to cultivate interest in that country's celebrities – but coverage of Chinese stars in attendance was negligible to non-existent.

Despite her donning a showstopping sequined Christopher Bu cape, Fan Bingbing's picture didn't make it into the wire services for hours. In the meantime, we were all sharing the same couple of grainy camera photos. Scarcer still were photographs of pop star Li Yuchun, a.k.a. Chris Lee, who has been on the cover of Vogue China and is a Loréal Paris ambassador there – social feeds were all sharing the same lone Getty snap. There were photos of Justin Bieber's Imperial dragon Balmain jacket from many angles, and of Rihanna's Guo Pei cloak, but while Yuchun's look was all over Chinese social media, she wasn't in any of the Western media's extensive carpet slideshows.

A focus of the multimedia exhibition is on cinema, the main way the West has received its image of China. Acclaimed filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai is the exhibition's artistic director, and, according to press notes there are images in the exhibit of Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong, the first Chinese-American Hollywood star. Hers was a reluctant stardom because it required playing to racist type, one that was perpetuated by the sinister-Chinese-"dragon lady" casting. That's when Wong could even get parts. More often, they went to white actors in yellowface. Instead of Wong in Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, for example, MGM cast Luise Rainer; and Katharine Hepburn with slanted eyes in the subsequent Dragon Seed is not an image easily forgotten.

To the Met, the gamine Yuchun, who wears her hair short and shaved, wore asymmetrical earrings and a sort of sleek Victorian frock-coat over sheer lace trousers, all black, by Riccardo Tischi at Givenchy (who has also designed her tour costumes). As an habituée of the front row (Balenciaga and Chanel), she should be the style press's premium catnip, appearing on the red carpet in what's often the more daring pieces from the collections, particularly next to the sameness of fit-and-flare Old Hollywood gowns worn by New Hollywood drones. At Cannes, she's worn flaming red Gareth Pugh head to toe with a turtleneck cascading with ruffles, a cloak and trousers; at other parties, she has paired Chanel and Givenchy with insider labels like Ermanno Scervino. As fashion darlings go, she's just this side of Tilda Swinton, but like Bingbing's 1930s Met Gala glamour, Yichun's chic, understated look was Chinese but not "Chinese."

You'd think that noticing and embracing the cool young stars in its increasingly exported culture would be a priority in the West's strategy to get China's attention and be part of its juggernaut. In an article last August (paywall), WWD reported that, as a rule, Chinese versions of international fashion magazine brands like GQ, Elle and Vogue sell more issues when homegrown stars are on the cover than American ones. Yet they're ignored in favour of the same Hollywood stars and still relegated to coverage from Chinese-language media.

The Met itself acknowledges that alongside the art and artifacts of Chinese material culture, what it's portraying is the influence of the fiction of China on the West. But a persistently warped Western image of China isn't historical – many Americans at the party dressed in the same reductive Orientalism promoted in Wong's movies, like expensive Pearl River Mart pastiche.

As nostalgia, it's awkward.

In a video tour of the exhibit, curator Andrew Bolton calls the exhibition "a fantastic pastiche of Chinese aesthetic and cultural traditions… and active, dynamic two-way conversation, a liberating force of cross-cultural combination, and representation." The acknowledgment seems an attempt to sidestep discussion of the complicated line between inspiration, cultural appropriation and mistranslation on show in garments in the exhibit, and outside on the red-carpeted steps.

Kar-Wai's esteemed long-time creative collaborator William Chang is responsible for the exhibition styling and in a rare interview in the book Filmcraft: Production Design, he brings up how Western film critics took issue with In the Mood for Love's secretary having such a deep wardrobe of exquisite cheongsams. "I think I know better than them, because I'm Chinese," Chang counters, and goes on to enumerate reasons the choice was historically accurate. "A lot of Americans have these preconceived ideas of 1960s Hong Kong, this Suzy Wong thing, I think. They never realized that Hong Kong had a commercial district with very fashionable ladies going around every day. Maybe they think it's all junk ships, you know, with sailors." I was keenly reminded of the fact that when it was announced last year, the exhibition was originally titled Chinese Whispers.

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