In China on Screen, Chris Berry and Mary Ann Farquhar ask, “How Should a Chinese Woman Look?” (2006: 108–134). They tackle this question by analyzing key performances by female film stars Ruan Lingyu, Xie Fang, Gong Li, and Maggie Cheung in order to interrogate the ways in which nationalism, modernity, and gender intertwine historically, specifically in the Republican era, the Mao era, the Reform Era, and, finally, the years leading up to the Handover of Hong Kong in 1997. Maggie Cheung’s performance of Ruan Lingyu in Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage (1991) brings these various looks full circle with a nostalgic return to a view of Chinese femininity that connects Shanghai before 1949 to Hong Kong before 1997. Ruan Lingyu and Maggie Cheung playing the silent film actress both wear distinctive qipao (cheongsam), a high-collared, form-fitting garment with side slits appropriated by women from male attire in the early twentieth century.

As the PRC moved into the twenty-first century, female director Xiao Jiang drew on Ruan Lingyu’s contemporary, Zhou Xuan, known for 1930s classics such as Street Angel (1937), as the fashion inspiration for characters living during and emerging from the Mao era in her film Electric Shadows (2004). In a different context, Asian American experimental filmmaker Michelle Sui cites Street Angel as a transnational, trans-historical bridge that uses Shanghai style to connect women across continents. Employing the iconic score from the 1937 feature as the soundtrack in a 2020 short film using the same title, Sui’s camera follows her vibrant-red-cheongsamclad figure through the streets of Los Angeles’ Chinatown.