Mao Zedong's jackets actually had a sort of shirt collar, which in tailoring vocabulary is called a signet collar. A shape that we find on many military clothing: more generous on Marshal Foch's coat, more closed and much higher on Lyautey's jacket.
In the 1970s, a dual aesthetic governed the arrival of these jackets: the martial look taken up by science fiction and the Indian look appreciated by the avant-garde. The Anglo-Saxons speak…