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Beijing, Impossibly Small

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The China Post tells us the total population of the municipality of Beijing, including legal and illegal migrant workers, is 17 million, a figure cited by most others. The Embassy of the PRC in the USA frightens us a bit more with 20 million. Many of my acquaintances, aiming to drive the annoying foreigner from these teeming shores, claim 25 or even 30 million. When talking to friends back home, I round up to a neat 100 million. Any fewer would be a let down. This is China.

And yet, I have almost never in recent memory walked down Nanluoguxiang without encountering at least three people I know. In evenings, when I don’t really photograph, the number is even higher. At times, it approaches 100 million. In Sanlitun, it is also common for me to run into people I know, though there I often pretend I am someone different. Granted, in the other million hectares of this miasma of concrete devouring the North China plain at light speed, it would be almost shocking to see a familiar face.

I literally always run into photographer Xiao Yang. Though I do like him, our meetings have not been intentional after the first one. Xiao Yang was on his way back from photographing the famous British-born art collector and critic, Karen Smith, who resides and houses her myriad works of avant-garde modern Chinese art in a courtyard near Jingshan.

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Women Can be Heroes Too!

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This young tourist is a college student from Zhengzhou, Henan. Ku Ke （库珂）is studying to be a broadcasting host at Huanghe Science and Technology College, a private institution. She was on vacation for a week in Beijing with one of her friends. Most of her time was spent around Nanluoguxiang and Houhai.

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When Plastered tee-shirts first opened shop on Nanluoguxiang, I thought it would appeal mainly to foreign tourists looking for a hip gift. In fact, I directed several of my guests to the shop. The appeal that the brand, started by a Brit about two years ago, has had for Chinese tourists and locals is quite impressive. I have seen the shirts incorporated into very fashionable ensembles at at parties all over town.

So was it Mao that said “women can be heroes too” （女人也能当英雄）？

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Stylites One of World’s 5 Best Street Blogs

Just as I received the hard copy of Der Spiegel in the mailbox of my courtyard, I also got word that H&M Magazine’s issue that features Stylites on page 18 was available in H&M shops around the world. H&M Magazine included Stylites in its list of the “World’s 5 Best Street Blogs” along with the Sartorialist and the Facehunter, the two most well-known blogs of this type. In thanks, I should mention that H&M will be making Beijing perfect, to paraphrase one of their slogans, within a month by opening its first shop at Joy City in Xidan.

H&M says its magazine has a global circulation of three-million. The top three US dailies are USA Today (2.3 million), The Wall Street (2.1 million), The New York Times (1.1 million), according to Wikipedia. Der Spiegel is a magazine with a circulation of 1.1 million.

The article includes a picture I took last summer of Edie Bao, who also appeared last week.

Also, I just saw that another blog Double King: Online Magazine for Fashion and Marketing did a post on Stylites.

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Beijing’s Young, Hip, Couples

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These couples may not be at the cutting edge of style, but it’s always fun to find couples in which the two parts seem to go exceptionally well together. This is rarer than one might expect. The usual situation is a female concerned with fashion in an utterly girly way and usually carrying a designer handbag, accompanied by a horribly dowdy male with pleather shoes and an ill-fitting overcoat. These two study art design at Beijing Huijia University. The skull trend, investigated before, seems loath to die.
It’s a bit late, but I might even jump on the trend. Velvet slippers with the skull and crossbones have been one of the hottest items for at least two winters, as this article from the Spectator explains.

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And these two are recent graduates of university. They now operate an online fashion boutique. They are both born and raised in Beijing itself. This is surprisingly rare. Most people I encounter were born in the provinces and came here to work. She is indeed wearing a Yoo-hoo hoodie. This is in fact what convinced me to take the pic.

Some of my other favorite couples that have appeared on Stylites are the high school pair in which the guy was wearing M&M trousers, the two roommates wearing zebra pants and this pair of lovebirds. The last picture gives a great look at a wall along Nanluoguxiang from about eight months before the Olympics. Things are a lot cleaner now, though I adore the interesting patterns that the elements create on walls over the years.

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Oil, Econ and Rock ‘n’ Roll

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Mylène Chen is an economist at Shell China Exploration and Production Co. Ltd. On the side, she sings for a rock band. Only 22, she speaks English and French, perhaps taking her name from France’s answer to Madonna. It’s funny because, in one of their constant comparisons of China with “developed” countries, several Beijingers have remarked to me that youngsters here have far fewer hobbies than their counterparts in the West. They do face far more constraints in the forms of huge loads of schoolwork and pressure from family, but I think that many people I meet in Beijing do a pretty good job in surmounting these.

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Red Pants Alert!!

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There’s more to be scared of here than just the red trousers. I know there is an indie band here called Hedgehog, but this young rocker must be part of Porcupine.

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I hope that bag is real. Clearly her boyfriend is investing all of his fashion renminbi in her. Aside from the tedious sack, I do rather like her look and it’s a nice shade of red.

Slim red jeans can be a good alternative to the usual blue. Anyway, this was a small fraction of the people wearing red pants on Nanluoguxiang this past weekend. It is a good color to wear. It symbolizes good luck and happiness and is thought to ward off evil.

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Stylish High Schooler

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This is perhaps both the youngest and most stylish person in Beijing. I photograph many people whose styles I find very interesting. The way they look, the way they dress, and what they tell me can form an alluring little story. However, I rarely find styles that are truly inspirational as well as original. This is one of those cases. A tenth grader at the German Embassy School (Deutsche Botschaftsschule Peking), Vera, originally from Austria, has lived in Beijing for nearly ten years, since she was quite little.

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Dapper Germans Understand Browns

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To celebrate the recent spike in German viewers resulting from the recent Spiegel article, here are two stylish German businessmen I encountered in Sanlitun. Claus Vogel is Senior Consultant at MSM Mandarin Strategy Management Consulting GmbH, a China-focused firm based in Düsseldorf. He shows us how well brown and navy go together. The navy Hugo Boss three-piece is nice with not only the shoes but also the brown tie, far preferable to the usual bright stripyness.

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His friend, mixing a utilitarin vest and high-quality casual wear, looks practical but stylish in earthtones. The suede monkstrap wholecuts are from Trickers and made in England.

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Rus in Urbe Afficianado

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This is an interesting use of color that seems concurrently dowdy and fresh, which is in some ways what I always like to find. Who wears a plaid vest over an oversized hoodie – with a cut-off denim skirt underneath and in bright colors like this? She seems like she is from a very avant-garde village. Her field of study, business management, could force her in the direction of somberness in dress before long.

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Translation of Der Spiegel Article

What is chic in Tokyo or Helsinki? Style conscious people discuss on the internet what is worn on the streets of this world, and they thereby change elite models worldwide.

The man whom Nels Frye spotlighted did not look especially good, but he was worth a second glance. Frye met him on Changan Avenue in Beijing, a type with an unusually long beard [NF Note: I described him as “Jesus-like”], Adidas-like shoes and checkered coat and a cane. In no way a model, but that man had style, an unusual sort of boho, so typical of China in a state of explosion, the birth of a new creative class, said Frye. [NF Note: Collecting bottles definitely demands resourcefulness but I’m not sure about creativity. He addressed the man, asked permission to take a photo and put it on his blog. A little later came the first comments. On Frye’s website a small debate erupted. This photo inspired Nels so much that from then on he travelled all over Beijing with his camera. He photographed girls, ones who have cut their hair like Manga figures, young men with beards, pea jackets, pants with piped jeans and zebra stripes, and he put their photos on the internet.

For him street-style blogging was a hobby

So the American businessman, Nels Frye, 27, on the side, became a street style blogger. Every young person who allowed him to document the style of their city entered his blog which then was sent to the entire world. And in consequence he turned the established world model on its head.

What is important is not trends but style. Street-style bloggers show what real persons in their daily lives wear on the street and convey this to an audience of millions. Instead of showing over stylized mode-lines with skinny models, they show in their internet diaries how real people interpret a couture-circus. Not trendy but determinedly style. Everyone can comment on every picture. English is the universal language. There is no competition: it is a democratic forum for young people who express themselves and make the internet a common medium of style.

For Frye it led to this suddenly people from Chicago, Berlin or Helsinki comment on his blog with suggestions that a coat should be lengthened a bit, or that a particular outfit is well thought out. Other blogs, who do the same as Frye in Beijing, link to his site “Stylites” and from day to day the number of hits increases. Publishers of style magazibnes ask if they may use his pictures, and designers invite him to their exhibitions.

Worldwide, there are hundreds of these street-style blogs, etc……….

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Vintage PR Girl

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Yet another little girl wielding a huge camera on Nanluoguxiang…Not long ago, any type of digital camera was a status symbol, but I fear that soon, not taking photos will be elitist thing to do, though of course we have to pass through the lomography phase first. She wears a vintage leather jacket and works in Edelman, a PR firm founded in Chicago and one of the few that is not part of the massive WPP Group. Former PR account executives appearing on Stylites all worked in subsidiaries of that group. We’ve had a young punk from Weber-Shandwick, funky Sabrina (here again) of Ogilvy, a fellow in a long cardigan from tobacco-protecting Hill and Knowlton, cute Michelle from Burson Marsteller and crafty Yuanyuan, also at one time a BM employee.

Last October while walking out of Uniqlo on Broadway I happened to run into Wynn, grandson of BM founder Harold Burson. An aspiring fashion designer in NYC, he was wearing a jacket with shoulders that stretched about a foot beyond his natural ones in both directions. A year and a half earlier, I had the honor of hosting this young man on my couch here in Beijing.

The international firms in Beijing attract fashionable and worldly young people, women mostly. Excellent written and spoken English is a must for communicating effectively with the mostly foreign clients as is an ability to function effectively in the corporate world. A fine-tuned mastery of the corporate jargon is essential. The leveraging and picking of low-hanging fruit never ends in these offices. If you want to learn more about PR in Beijing, I suggest checking out Imagethief.

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Xiao Yang, Photographer

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Who should I run into on Gulou the other day but Xiaoyang, the photographer who formerly shot me for 1626? When he came over my place for the photoshoot last year, we finished a bottle of wine and had a great chat. At that point, he said that he didn’t have much in the way of work. Now, recession and all, he has a full-time job photographing for a magazine. Some of the pics he took of me are on the About Nels Frye and the Senli and Frye pages. This is a particular favorite.