China poblana

China poblana is considered the traditional style of dress of women in Mexico, although in reality it only belonged to some urban zones in the middle and southeast of the country, before its disappearance in the second half of the 19th century. "Poblanas" are women of Puebla.
Fashion design of the "china dress".
The fashion design of the "china poblana dress" is attributed to Catarina de San Juan, although it certainly incorporates elements from the diverse cultures that were mixed in New Spain during three centuries of Spanish rule.
According to descriptions written in the 19th century, the era in which the dress was very popular in various cities in the middle and southeast of Mexico, "china" outfit is made up of the following garments:
Cultural representations of "la china".
Nineteenth-century descriptions of women wearing the "china" paint them as simultaneously attractive and too risque for the times. Men saw these women as beautiful for their brown complexion, their "plump" but not "fat" body and face, and, most significantly, their differences from women of higher social strata in their lack of artifices to enhance their beauty. Author José María Rivera notes that if a "china" woman would have seen a corset, she would have thought it a torture device such as used on Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins; and that her face was not some sort of "cake frosting", an allusion to the "proper" women whose faces would have to be washed to see if the colors run:
In that sense, the wardrobe of the "china" woman was considered too provocative. Contemporary Mexican journalists and foreigners who knew these women in the first half of the nineteenth century call attention to the way in which the fashion of peasant women showed off their feminine forms, or were an appropriate feature of all the graces that were attributed to these women. A verbal portrait was made of them as excellent dancers of jarabe music popular in that era—like "El Atole", "El Agualulco", "El Palomo" and others that form part of the folkloric jarabes of the twentieth century—, also as models of cleanliness and order; of fidelity to "their man" although also seen as very liberal sexually.
Not that much is known about the China Poblana mostly because many know it but there is no actual evidence saying that she did in fact exist. And there for many people argue that because if this it might just be a legend. One thing to keep in mind is that no one had writing utensils and no television and therefore to pass the time they told stories. This is also known as word of mouth and this might just have been one of those stories where it was passed down from generation to generation.
Origins.
Origin of the fashion design of "la china".
As mentioned in the introduction of this article, the Pueblan origin of the "china poblana" outfit has been put in doubt on occasion. The correlation between the "china"—as a popular figure— and the outfit worn by the historic China Poblana—the alluded-to Catarina de San Juan— is a product of the evolution of Mexican culture during the first decades of the 20th century. In fact, "las chinas" became a well defined meme in the 19th century, a little more than a century after the death of Catarina de San Juan. Writer Gauvin Alexander Bailey points out: