This chapter takes Zhang Ailing as the core case to explore the “alternative material path” chosen by urban new women in Republican Shanghai, which differs from the revolutionary path. While Yan&s;an revolutionary women devoted themselves to collective ideals, Shanghai urban women pursued individual freedom, personality expression and emotional sustenance through fashion consumption, self-adornment, and material life. Influenced by her aristocratic family background and Westernized urban environment, Zhang Ailing had a strong love for modern material life and fashion dressing. Trapped in distant, tense, and stressful interpersonal relationships with her mother, nanny, and others, she gradually withdrew into solitude and emotional distance from people. She constructed a private bodily utopia through clothing, aesthetics, and imagination to gain inner peace and self-value. Her life and thoughts reflect another spiritual state and survival dilemma of modern new women: Pursuing immediate individual comfort and material freedom, yet falling into permanent loneliness and spiritual emptiness without collective belonging.