Qipao, literally "Manchu robe", is generally referred to as cheongsam in Hong Kong, meaning long dress. Cheongsam was once everyday fashion for Hong Kong women, whether they were celebrities, housewives, or working women.  As large numbers of tailors from Shanghai resettled in Hong Kong in the late 1940s, the cheongsam also grew in popularity throughout the 1950s and 1960s.  To this day, cheongsam is still a popular choice of formal attire and a source of inspiration for fashion designers, comics artists, cultural researchers, and filmmakers alike.

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The cheongsam is a dress that has become an internationally recognized symbol of Chinese cultural identity and femininity, originating as a combination of Han and Manchu styles of clothing and further influenced by American fashion. For Canadian-born women of Chinese origin, the wearing of this dress is fraught with tensions between desire and fear, wonder and contestation.

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The First Monday in May is a 2016 documentary film directed by Andrew Rossi. The film follows the creation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2015 art exhibition China: Through the Looking Glass by curator Andrew Bolton.

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Useless, a film about fashion and clothing production in 2007, investigates the human condition in contemporary China based on three places involved with this incredibly large branch of Chinese industry.

Recognition from Paris’s Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture is considered the apex of the fashion industry, and Chinese designer Guo Pei is determined to reach it. With a remarkable eye for detail and exquisite blending of visual art forms, veteran documentarian Pietra Brettkelly captures Guo’s drive, artistry, meticulousness, and acumen, from the designer’s emergence on the international scene.

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Known for his avant-garde methods, Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto has been one of the most influential and enigmatic fashion designers of the past four decades. 

Six of Japan’s emerging design talents meet to collaborate with six models with diverse personalities and bodies, some accompanied by wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs, to push the limits of fashion as we know today to create final looks.

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Nora Noh is the first fashion designer in South Korea. Her lifetime has coincided with sweeping westernization of South Korean culture and the emancipation of the country’s women. Noh has also garnered international acclaim, and her elegant creations have graced the covers of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. Fluidly edited pieces of archive footage from South Korea of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s are intercut with interviews with former customers, film stars and fashion experts talking about what Noh’s clothing meant to them.