The Miao people usually wear casual clothes, mainly home-grown, home-spun, and homemade linen dresses, which are extremely simple. Wearing costumes on festival days, commonly known as "flower clothes", are colorful, exquisitely crafted, beautiful and full of national characteristics. The fabrics for floral dresses are mostly made of white linen or cotton. The fabrics must be processed by batik, embroidery and other processes before being cut into dresses.
Batik was called "wax valerian" in ancient times. (Dongchuan Prefecture Chronicle) records: "Use wax to draw flowers on cloth and dye it. Once the wax is removed, the pattern will look like a painting." Miao women often practice this art. Use a bamboo wax knife dipped in dissolved wax to draw patterns on the base material. The base material with the pattern drawn is put into the dye vat for dyeing and then boiled in clean water. The wax juice melts and falls off, and the pattern appears. The patterns of batik are mainly flowing water, flowers, plants, insects, fish, birds and geometric patterns. When painting, there is no drawing, no ruler, ruler and other tools. The heart, mind and pen are attentive, abstract and concrete, and realistic. and exaggeration, regularity and change, all determined by the author's aesthetic taste and skills. The artistic personality is distinctive and the spirit is free. Embroidery is a long-standing arts and crafts of the Miao people. Embroidery techniques include flat embroidery, broken embroidery, seed embroidery, plate embroidery, silk embroidery and dozens of other stitching techniques. The patterns and shapes are mostly based on flowers, birds, insects, fish and "gods" in nature worship, such as sludge. The unstained lotus, the pure and clear magnolia, the winter plum blossoms proud of the frost and snow, the elegant autumn chrysanthemums, the fairy-like white cranes, the light and soaring swallows, as well as dragons and phoenixes, phoenixes wearing peonies, and double phoenixes The combined patterns of the rising sun, two dragons playing with pearls, and three friends of Sui Han are simple, elegant, and beautiful.
When the fabrics processed by batik and embroidery are sewn into dresses, they are also inlaid with colorful strips and embellishments that are full of ethnic characteristics. The ancient Miao song "The Battle of the Deer" has an affectionate expression of the patterns on the floral dress and its symbolic meaning: "My lovely Jiang Pu, embroidered on the floral dress will always be remembered by future generations. ... That piece of collar represents the capital, and the pattern on the floral dress represents the capital." The squares represent the fields, the dots represent the ears of grain, the pattern is the "Luo Lang Zhou Bottom", the wavy lines of the apron are the rushing river, and the pointed blue pattern on the edge is the eternal valley. "Obviously, Floral clothing is not only an expression of beauty, but also embodies the deep nostalgia for the ancestors and the ancestral homeland.
The floral clothes made by the Miao people in Zhaotong area have fine workmanship and novel patterns. They have strong national characteristics and regional cultural characteristics and enjoy a high reputation in the country. In 1983, the Miao costumes produced by the Zhaotong Ethnic Garment Factory were selected for display at the Beijing Ethnic Culture Palace. In 1985, the Miao costumes produced in Weixin County were purchased and collected by Beijing Ethnic Culture Palace, Hubei Provincial Exhibition Hall, and Hubei Provincial Religious Affairs Bureau. The Sichuan University Museum collects two pieces of Miao floral clothing collected from Zhenxiong and Weixin folk in the 1920s. In their studies of these two floral garments, Chinese and foreign scholars have found that the waistband pattern is surprisingly similar to the national costume patterns found in Romania and Ukraine in Europe in terms of conception, composition, color, shape, and meaning. The nine grids of varying sizes on the pleated skirt pattern are consistent with the shape and arrangement of the empty "grids" on the body of the pre-Qin bronze drum unearthed in Chuxiong. This shows that the Miao ethnic minority has a long history of colorful clothing.
Floral clothing is the festival costume of the Miao people. It is an expression of the beautiful soul and emotions of the simple, kind, hard-working and intelligent Miao people. It is a brilliant flower in the garden of national arts and crafts.