In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the heroine enters an imaginary, alternative universe by climbing through a mirror in her house. In this world, a reflected version of her home, everything is topsy-turvy and back-to-front.

Like Alice’s make-believe world, the China mirrored in the fashions in the China Through the Looking Glass exhibition is wrapped in invention and imagination.

Stylistically, these fashions belong to the practice of Orientalism which, since the publication of Edward Said’s seminal treatise on the subject in 1978 has taken on negative connotations of Western supremacy and segregation. At its core, Said interprets Orientalism as a Eurocentric worldview that essentialises Eastern peoples and cultures as a monolithic other.

Douglas Dillion Galleries

While neither discounting nor discrediting the issue of the representation of ‘subordinated otherness’ outlined by Said, this exhibition attempts to propose a less politicised and more positivistic examination of Orientalism as a site of infinite and unbridled creativity. Through careful juxtapositions of Western fashions and Chinese costumes and decorative arts, it presents a rethinking of Orientalism as an appreciative cultural response by the West to its encounters with the East.

The ensuing dialogues are not only mutually enlivening and enlightening, but they also encourage new aesthetic interpretations and broader cultural understandings.

Anna Wintour Costume Centre, Imperial China.

The exhibition, which is a collaboration between the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute and the Department of Asian Art, explores the impact of Chinese aesthetics on Western fashion and the way China has fuelled the fashionable imagination for centuries.

The China mirrored in the fashions in this exhibition is wrapped in invention and imagination

High fashion is juxtaposed with Chinese costumes, paintings, porcelains and other art, including films, to reveal intriguing reflections of Chinese imagery.

From the earliest period of European contact with China in the 16th century, the West has been enchanted with enigmatic objects and imagery from the East.

Such imagery has provided inspiration for fashion designers from Paul Poiret to Yves Saint Laurent, whose fashions are infused at every turn with romance, nostalgia, and make-believe.

Douglas Dillion Galleries

Through the looking glass of fashion, designers conjoin disparate stylistic references into a pastiche of Chinese aesthetic and cultural traditions.

The exhibition features more than 140 examples of haute couture and avant-garde ready-to-wear, alongside Chinese art. Film representations of China are incorporated throughout to reveal how our visions of the nation are framed by narratives that draw upon popular culture, and also to recognise the importance of cinema as a medium through which to understand the richness of Chinese history.

Evening gown by Guo Pei.

As if by magic, the distance between East and West, spanning perspectives that are often perceived as monolithic and diametrically opposed, diminishes. So, too, does the association of the East with the natural and the authentic and the West with the cultural and the simulacrum.

As these binaries dissolve and disintegrate, what emerges is an active, dynamic two-way conversation, a liberating force of cross-cultural communication and representation.

Cinema often serves as a conduit for this reciprocal exchange. Film is frequently the first lens through which Western designers encounter Chinese imagery, and this exhibition explores the impact of movies in shaping their fantasies.

Through the work of Chinese directors – especially the Fifth Generation, including Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and Tian Zhuangzhuang – the show also addresses China’s role in shaping its own self-image.

At times borrowing from Orientalist tropes, Chinese directors have perpetuated some of the misperceptions that had shaped Western fantasies of China. Aided by such cinematic representations, the comparisons and conversations in the exhibition reimagine the relationship between East and West not as one-sided mimicry, but rather as a layered series of enfolded exchanges.

China Through the Looking Glass runs until September 7 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the US.

www.metmuseum.org