My friend Lysa is Chinese. She lives in Beijing and is a senior in college. When most of her friends are preparing for grad school or looking for internships. Lysa has her mind set on doing something else. Here is her story:
A way to look at the timeline of a country’s fashion industry is by looking at their first publication dates of the fashion magazines. And through that, one can see how late this industry started to appear in China. Elle published its print version in Chinese in 1988, making it one of the first foreign fashion magazines that started doing business in China. And that’s more than four decades after the magazine was founded in the U.S. Following Elle, Harper’s Bazaar opened in 2001. Marie Claire started in December 2002, and Vogue, even later, in 2005 –– more than a century after it published its first issue of weekly newspaper in 1892.
This is not to say that the fashion landscape in China falls behind for more than 100 years, but it is true that China’s socialist economy before 1980s had never given fashion much of a space to grow. From 1953 to early 1980s, the way people obtained the majority of their clothing items was not to walk into a store and point to a shelf, like what they would do today. Instead, they received fabric coupons from the government. The amount of fabric given to each household is determined by the number of members and the age of each member in the household. After receiving the fabric, people would take them to tailors or sew it into clothes themselves. This policy, which sounds like something that could only happen in another parallel universe today, was not abolished until merely 40 years ago in China.
Soon after clothing coupon became history and fashion magazines began to kick off, everything else happened like a chin reaction: international clothing brands started to open their stores in the mainland, and China began to have its own fashion brands. And boom! Here comes the 1990, when the group we are talking today, the post-90s, came to the world.
Although the clashes between the post-90s generation and their parents’ generation were not obvious back when they were just born, it is of no suspense to anyone that these two generations will likely not share their views on fashion. The parents of the post-90s grew up in the era of clothing coupons and Cultural Revolution, when resources were scarce and options were not as many. But it’s different for Lysa and her peers. Making someone like Lysa to share the same mindset their parents have about clothing and fashion –– the mindset being “fashion is not only utterly useless and a waste of time, but it also reflects on poor self-esteem” — is close to impossible. Lysa recalled her time in high school when her teacher would ask her to remove her nail polish because “it distracted her from academics.” When saying that, Lysa shook her head and said she never understood why “pursuing something beautiful would become a sin.” This was by no means an experience only Lysa had as a child.
Similar to Lysa, Gogo Wang hasn’t been writing about fashion for very long either. But in this recent blog article she put out, Gogo described her journey from writing about fashion as an interest to having 200,000 views per month on her blog posts. In many ways, Gogo is very similar with Lysa: both of them are post-90s, coming from middle-class families, with background in being educated in foreign countries, also fluent in English. They both live in Beijing, and even their childhood experiences with fashion are strikingly similar. Gogo said her parents are engineer and writer. The only part of the mall she could go and spend time in as a kid was the bookstore. But as post-90s in China have tremendously more opportunities to interact with cultures from around the world, they get to see a side of fashion industry that their parents never had the opportunities to be exposed to.
Lysa once said watching a New York Times video about fashion in Beijing made her cringe, because those people in the interview were saying things like “Roman style,” “hip-hop style” and “Lady Gaga has worn these.”
“What does that even mean?” Lysa commented. “And why can’t we have styles of our own?”
All of these became Lysa’s motivation to start her own fashion blog, where she talks about how to not spend a lot of money but still wear with styles: not Korean or Japanese or European styles, but something more unique to young Chinese. In the “about me” page, Lysa mentioned her understanding of fashion, not as a luxury, and definitely not as a waste of time, but as a way to show appreciation in little things in life.
Play with RMB 