PARALLEL THREADS
Costume as Modernity’s Second Skin in Edward Yang
By Betty Liu
A pioneer of the Taiwan New Wave, Edward Yang had an acute grasp of Taipei in the age of globalization. Yang’s debut feature That Day, on the Beach (1983) and his last, Yi Yi (2000) sit at opposite ends of a seventeen-year long illustrious career — the latter widely regarded as his magnum opus. Like parallel train tracks, they share a quiet, bittersweet symmetry; in both films, old friends meet again after decades apart. Yet as memories are recalled, everything that is unsaid between them are revealed through the costumes Yang frames them in.
In The Fashioned Body (2000), sociologist Joanne Entwistle described dress as the outcome of social pressures in everyday life and “the image the dressed body makes can be symbolic of the situation in which it is found.” Yang’s first and final feature uses costume as a second skin — a layer between the body and the world that characters wear to project success, composure, and modernity. But it's a skin that can crack, slip, or betray what it was meant to conceal.
This essay looks at how Yang dresses these two reunions, and what those costumes reveal about class, memory, and the cost of becoming modern in post-martial law Taipei.
That Day, on the Beach stars Sylvia Chang as Jiali and Terry Hu as Tan Weiqing, two old friends who reunite after thirteen years apart. Their luncheon rendezvous is framed through an upscale restaurant in 1980s postmodernist outfitting. As Weiqing walks across the dining room to greet Jiali, Yang provides a full-frame shot of this reunion, giving us a glimpse of their outfits from head to toe before cutting back to medium close-ups.
Yang presents Weiqing and Jiali as visual opposites: the former dressed in a minimalist black dress suit, the latter in a white blazer suit set. We see the juxtaposition of Weiqing’s diamond-encrusted fine jewellery against Jiali’s choice of pearls. While both are equal markers of high society status, the jewellery highlights the difference between Weiqing’s Western, European sensibilities and the entrenched influence of Japanese colonialism that still shapes Jiali’s identity.
We learn that Weiqing is an accomplished pianist who recently returned to Taipei after thirteen years in Europe. She reveals that she left because of her breakup with Jiali’s brother, Jiasen: “But we broke up. Everything changed. All that was left was music. And all I wanted was to leave.” When Jiali asks Weiqing if she remembers the summer before she started college, the film flashbacks to a teenage Jiali in a palette of white frill-collared blouses and a college-aged Weiqing in a myriad of plaid shirts and denim. Cutting back and forth between the innocence of their youth and their present cosmopolitan selves, Yang reminds the audience of the distance between the women they were and the women they have become.
Back in the present, the sharp, upturned blazer collar that Jiali wears (often a marker of success and career mobility for the modern working woman in the eighties) slowly begins to deflate as she recounts her first love and now-husband, Cheng Dewei. In pursuit of happiness and to avoid the same fate of losing her love like her brother did with Weiqing, she fled her family home and reunited with Dewei in Taipei, where they decided to marry. Jiali’s determined path for a happily-ever-after is a fallacy she will soon come to realize, as it’s not long before their marriage deteriorates. She finds solace through retail therapy, bringing about her first major sartorial transformation. Up until this point, Jiali’s attire consisted of simple blouses akin to those from her childhood and conservative pencil skirts. Her choice to get a perm—an on-trend hairstyle worn by 1980s Japanese pop stars like Minako Yoshida—is a deliberate attempt to discard her prim and proper image for a more cosmopolitan self.
When Jiali arrives home after visiting her father at the hospital, she is seen in this new look: a long black shoulder-padded dress accessorized with a foulard belt and a double-strand pearl necklace. She is greeted by a woman in red, equally matched in style but with a touch of sensual flair that Jiali lacks. The woman reveals her affair with Dewei to Jiali, leaving her with the line, “the world I grew up in taught me that it’s a world without love.” Whether or not Jiali’s new look was meant to project feigned confidence in rekindling her marriage, the woman in red blows a hole right through Jiali's carefully constructed second skin.
In the aftermath of this confrontation, Jiali voices the disillusionment that her carefully curated life has brought her: “We read so many books... Why did no one ever teach us how to face such an important, difficult problem? ... Whether it's a novel or a movie, it always ends with the two people getting married—a perfect happy ending. But what happens after the happy ending? No one taught us that. And no one gave us any chance to practice.” It is a devastating realization: the modern, cosmopolitan life she bought into—and dressed herself for—was just a narrative trope. Joanne Finkelstein in The Fashioned Self (1991) raised the tension in how: “when we value physical appearance as a means of increasing our success or effectiveness in social interactions, we risk limiting the social experience to a barter or exchange controlled by prevailing stereotypes.” The designer clothes, the perm, the pearls: they were the costume of a happy ending that never existed. The sharp, popped collar we saw in the beginning has now fully collapsed as she reveals to Weiqing the truth of her marriage.
As the women sit across from each other with the tragedy of the marriage now exposed, Weiqing finally gathers the courage to ask about the one person she wanted to know about the most: Jiali’s brother, Jiasen. Jiali softly breaks the news that he passed away from lung cancer a year ago. The question Weiqing saved for last can no longer be answered.
Here, Yang reveals the full function of Weiqing’s minimalist black dress. It is not just the professional uniform of an accomplished concert pianist, nor merely a chic European contrast to Jiali's white suit; it is also mourning attire. While Jiali performs the role of the successful modern wife to hide her failing marriage, Weiqing wears the black of a widow. Her second skin—the cosmopolitan armor she built abroad—has been permanently coded with grief for the love she left behind. In the final moments of their reunion, as Weiqing and Jiali step out from the restaurant, Yang gives us one last full-body shot of Jiali as she parts from Weiqing. Her jacket, now back in its upturned collar position, along with the satin chemise top and Louis Vuitton clutch, reassert her poised composure.
If Weiqing and Jiali's reunion is a masterclass in how clothing conceals grief, seventeen years later, Yang would revisit this exact dynamic with NJ (Wu Nien-jen) and Sherry (Ko Su-yun) in Yi Yi— but this time, stripping away the formal wear to see what happens when their corporate armor is taken off.
As Entwistle notes in The Fashioned Body, formal functions enforce elaborate rules far more strictly than informal situations. A black-tie dress code dictates not only that attendees must dress formally, but that the dress itself is gendered: a gown for a woman, a dinner jacket for a man. At his brother-in-law’s wedding, NJ bumps into his old classmate and ex-lover, Sherry, in the reception lobby. Their attire fulfills these strict stipulations perfectly. Sherry’s semi-sheer embellished black evening dress, paired with a sleek low bun and a black clutch, signals to both the audience and to NJ that she is a successful businesswoman from abroad. Conversely, NJ’s formal suit is not an exclusive special occasion outfit; it is something he wears throughout the majority of the film. Whether he is at work or visiting family, the uniform of the Taipei businessman is a permanent second skin he has grown into.
When NJ gets a chance to go to Japan for a business trip, he makes plans to meet with Sherry from Chicago there. As the camera laterally tracks through the glassy corporate blocks of Tokyo, NJ arrives outside the hotel where Sherry awaits him. When they see each other, the reserved stances they took at the wedding disappear; sentiments of regret and resentment are forgotten as they share a deep embrace. The uniforms of affluent professionals are gone as they spend time together reminiscing about their past in this third space. Sherry is almost unrecognisable in her glasses, collared shirt and black cardigan. NJ is also seen in a much more casual, pared-back look, shedding his business suit for a plaid shirt and field jacket.
In a later scene as NJ and Sherry stroll through the streets of Tokyo, a familiar colour palette from the opening reunion of Weiqing and Jiali makes its reappearance: the contrasting use of black and white. What’s different here from That Day, on the Beach is that this time, Yang is not merely framing NJ and Sherry as visual opposites. Sherry wears a black top over a loose, unbuttoned white shirt; NJ, standing close to her, wears the inverted colours of Sherry’s—an unbuttoned white polo over a loose, open black cardigan. What Yang wants to draw the audience’s attention to is the shedding of their second skin as social rules are suspended. Their casual sartorial choice is not only a departure from their initial meeting as distant figures, but also a metaphorical highlight of the yin-yang in NJ and Sherry’s relationship: the more they retrace memories and reminisce about the past, the more it’s revealed that they are mirrored versions of each other.
When Sherry confesses to NJ the trauma of his disappearance, she says: “Waiting…became my only hope. I waited the first day, and when you didn’t come, I just kept waiting there the next day. I begged my friends to go look for you, but you ignored me. You just disappeared like that.” NJ explains his struggle with her then expectations of him: “The day I got into electrical engineering, my dad was happy, my mum was happy, you were happy. And me? I was the saddest person of all. It’s impossible for a person to let someone else teach them how to live, how to get by…But the person doing it just happened to be the person I loved the most.” Yang shows us that no matter how complementary they are to each other, the decades apart have put far too much distance between them. They can no longer reconnect. The casual clothes only represent a temporary reprieve. For a brief moment in Tokyo, they can be just the NJ and Sherry they used to be, not the businessman and the expat. The second skin, however, is never fully removed; they have to put it back on when they return to Taipei.
Over a career spanning two decades, Yang’s films portrayed Taiwan’s transformation and cemented his status in the Taiwan New Wave canon through their intergenerational representations of Taiwanese identity. That Day, on the Beach and Yi Yi show us the different ways in which characters navigate their second skin. In the former, Jiali’s second skin is a performance she can still disrupt, as she pops her collar back up in her departure from the reunion with Weiqing. Yang’s swan song, Yi Yi, encapsulates the moment the second skin becomes permanent; NJ returns to his family and his business suits, no longer able to shed his skin regardless of his desire to do so. Decades separate Jiali's white suit from NJ’s white polo. But for Yang, the distance between them is not measured in years. It is measured in how much of the self has been absorbed into the second skin, and how little remains underneath.
Betty Liu is a fashion practitioner whose practice spans fashion design and costume in film. Liu is deeply interested in how clothing constructs identity, class and memory in Asian cinema.
This piece was written for ZHOU RI (@zhou__ri) and CIFF to celebrate the launch of Focus on the Taiwan New Wave at ACMI, October 7 – October 25.