Mao is the name of a form of shirt or jacket, an obvious reference to the clothing always worn by the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong (1893-1975). It can also refer to a whole outfit: a closed jacket, with a stand-up collar fastened with a button, with two front pockets and loose pants. It is usually made of black, dark blue or khaki green cotton.
The Mao suit
During the early 1960s, the fashion for this type of suit spread throughout London, in particular for women, thus becoming a unisex style, a form of ideological uniform, and adopted as such especially by left-leaning artists, intellectuals, and radical-chic women. However, this shirt-jacket (also known as “Korean-style”) still remains a constant in contemporary fashion.
