No part of Beijing is more closely associated with youth culture. The crowds of stylish young people are positively overwhelming. In the past, style here has ranged from the bizarrely provincial, to the unapologetically Japanophilic, to the tight jeans and bleached hair that leave one guessing as to whether the wearer is a hair stylist or of a more interesting profession. As with many parts of the city, Xidan becomes more sanitized with the opening of every new high street shop.
These hair stylists stand outside the malls of Xidan all winter long, waylaying unsuspecting passersby, attempting to drag them in for a cut. They insist that the potential victim’s hair looks terrible and that they can do a better job – or perhaps it is just my hairdo that is particularly dreadful. Even if it is, I’m not sure that I would trust them to make it alright.
These guys are particularly aggressive with females. They will corner unattached girls, getting really close to them, and talk to them for as long as possible, even following them. I don’t think it is mean-spirited or with definite ill-intent, but it certainly would make me uncomfortable if I were one of the targets.
I like the rock and roll look of this guy. I think it is important to realize that Stylites is a record. Much of the time this is an anthropological exercise rather than an aesthetic one. I’m not deliberately attempting to provide style inspirations or examples of refined taste. The attempt is to document the development of style and fashion on the of Beijingers – to show the style landscape, as it were. So if the people photographed are rookies in the world of style or global fashion, then that is what will be here. I’m going to be putting up a full mission statement soon, that will pick up on these ideas.
This guy was trying to help me find other people to photograph, though that might have been yet another ploy to talk to girls.
I don’t know if I would call this “style” but he’s certainly a representative of the new youth of modern China. He is a middle school student who was outside Xidan yelling quite a lot. I wasn’t able to determine why.
I actually like the dark blue coat and hot pink turtleneck. One of my sweaters is the same color. She’s a designer but was in a great hurry so I’m not sure what she designs. Xidan is Beijing’s answer to Shibuya, though it is quite a lot grittier. It has the largest concentration of young people dressing in interesting ways.
I was originally attracted to this pair by her cross, but he would not allow me to take a photo of her alone. In fact, he is quite stylish himself with the Chinese shoes and jacket mixed with an outfit that is fairly preppy. He commented that before going into the work place, Chinese young people follow the Korea and Japan for style inspiration. Once they get white color jobs, the rather restrictive style guidelines of the West must be followed. Right now, of course, he added, Chinese youth are swept up in the craze for all styles English, which seems to be the global zeitgeist. Though she wears the cross, she is not one of China’s millions of new Christians.
He was in a hurry and didn’t have much time to chat. This was right by the Xiehe Hospital on Dongdan. I think this fellow looks great though – picky but relaxed – studied disheveledness but not in a preppy way. Tie with sneakers rarely works. (0) Comments | Post Comment
Stylites in Beijing will soon be moving to a permanent address: stylites.net. Before this move occurs, updates may be less frequent, so I ask you to bear with me. We have to try to make our new home stylish before moving in. It might be a sort of bohemian shack at first though.
Anyway, I will send notification when the next site is up and running.
Riding my bike out of the Candy Floss Cafe – one of Beijing’s best spots for sunny Sunday afternoon, I encountered this apparition. Judging by her gear, she is a much more serious photographer than I pretend to be. I adore women with colorful scarves. She was on her way to some kind of performance, apparently in the company of her mother.
A fellow who lives on the tenth floor of my building. We met him in the elevator. I don’t know how he managed to evade me for the last thirteen months. Perhaps the only interesting looking individual in the entire several-thousand-man-strong residential complex.
If you don’t live in China, you might not find this fellow exceptional.
But most of his contemporaries are extreme of dowdiness. They are pudgy little goons wearing brown polyester polo shirts with the playboy logo and sporting a comb-over and a pleather manbag. Styles like this just aren’t common in his generation.
Here we have John Travolta’s Grease hair-do with a late ’80s “our country just opened to the West” Chinese swoosh. He bought this pair of flared jeans sixteen years ago and has been wearing them since. I told him I thought he must be an artistic type, and he responded that he was just a normal working man. (0) Comments | Post Comment
Rating Yang Fan as an artist is beyond my ability, but her paintings admirably depict the young Chinese girl dominated by materialism and faintly understood Westernized values.
These are beautiful girls whose ideals for fashion, physique, and sexual expression changed drastically in the space of a few years.
Life was service to family. It suddenly became the pursuit of pleasure.
These girls are much more stylish and attractive than the typical specimen you see just off the train at Beijing’s Central Station (right next to my work).
A young shop assistant at the Muxiyuan Fabric market.
A young hipster on Chaonei Avenue. He described himself as a freelancer, but his two, less stylish, friends said that he doesn’t have a job. His main inspiration is Japanese youth fashion and he buys rags at Xidan.
I may not go. How could it possibly be as charming as the old Vic’s?
Really. Ignore the packaging for a moment. A place isn’t made so much by the decor and music as by the wit and beauty of its clientale. It was a place with men of style and women of substance.
It’s amusing to recall the image in my mind when I first heard of Vic’s.
My New York friend, who had never actually been himself, suggested I go since he had heard it was THE place for expats in Beijing.
I imagined a Bogartesque owner, named Vic, nursing a scotch or maybe even a mint julep while his gaze lingered on a lovely Danish photographer just back from the Onon river in Mongolia. There would be a North Korean propoganda movie director, really a spy, aiming to befriend gullible but lovable Midwesterners in derby hats. A Japanese diplomat, somehow blending stiffness with affability, would be stroking his Siamese cat as he spoke perfect French with an aspiring actress just off the plane from Paris, trying to hide that she was from a village outside Toulouse and not the capital. The wife of an unnamed but utterly powerful CCP official would be present, but no one would be sure which of the elegant ladies was her.
The movie is not incredible, but the bar Ralph Fiennes opens in the White Countess would be nice in reality. I thought Vics would be a bit like that bar, with all of its intrigues and glamour.
Instead I got six high school students doing shots, two Chinese girls snorting coke for the first time in the bathroom, and some skinny Long Islanders hanging out upstairs, humping all the new arrivals.
Comments
Funny~ I think I have been to Vics twice. I gotta say I prefer the place across the street. Posted by Pescatore on 05/18/2007 02:06:28 AM
Pesci, you came to Beijing without contacting me? Posted by stylites on 05/18/2007 02:51:50 AM
This man could be anywhere in China. They are the dark dandies of urban streets. The hair cutters. The men who dare prance. Long, slim, shoes are essential.
This is at Chaonei South Street. To see really over-the-top hair cutters, you should head to Hangzhou.
Despite the thousands of people switching trains at Fuxingmen, I still spotted this guy, beyond the wall.
He’s a petite bourgeois who owns a clothing store.
Quite an appropriate image for Tom Meaney’s birthday – no? They would totally be friends.
We can do blazers in this cut, too, but the quality of the fabric and buttons would be far superior. I’ll even perform a complimentary lip piercing for you.
All of a sudden, as I was walking out of the Willy Ronis photography exhibit at Beijing Capital Museum, everyone seemed to wearing suspenders. The thin suspenders with a tee shirt and skinny pants look was revived on the Dior Homme runway for the spring 2006 collection, but it has long been an emblem of various British rocker subcultures. The “skinheads” of Beijing adore prancing about in this style.
This fellow leads a band that frequently performs at the Nameless Highland. His shirt actually says “skinhead”, as do the tee-shirts of most Beijing skinheads.
This is the first woman I have seen in China wearing suspenders – and they are these very slim plaid ones. I noted that the dude that walked out of the exhibit right before her was also wearing suspenders, and she made clear that she had absolutely no connection with him and was following her own style muse. It was just a coincidence that there were two suspendered people walking out of the Willy Ronis exhibit at the same time. She is studying journalism and shops at Xidan mainly. She wanted my number.
Here shoes were in some ways more notable than her suspenders.
Below Hedi Slimane shows us that the thin suspenders look is best executed with a sleeveless shirt.
And white socks on display.
The two-tone shoes are also essential.
And a subtle cat reference in your trousers is never a minus. I tried to find a photo with a man wearing suspenders, but couldn’t, so here is the classic if you don’t recall Willy Ronis:
China’s retail sales hit 320 billion yuan (42 billion U.S. dollars) during the May Day holidays, up 15.5 percent from the same period last year, according to the Ministry of Commerce.
The ministry said liquid crystal TV sets, jewelry, digital cameras, and fashion clothes were among the bestsellers.
The whole problem is that they don’t consume enough and the economy depends on exports, meaning US consumption. Put simply, China runs into trouble when the US economy dips, as it could be doing now. In the United States, the contribution of domestic consumption to growth is over three times the contribution of exports. International trade matters more to China than it does to the US.
When the contribution of domestic consumption to GDP in China is doubled or tripled that of exports, many key parts of China will be under water. When all Chinese consume at an American level, there will be much less oxygen and dry land on the planet. But humans always evolve. To leapfrog ahead in their conceptual thinking, young Chinese fashion designers need to showcase mandarin collar tees with slits in the side for gills. What will be the fashion in our “submerged future with Chinese characteristics”?
Comments
grammar mistakes notwithstanding, the last paragraph is the best thing I have read all day Posted by pescatore on 05/09/2007 06:38:32 AM
Uh…those are all for effect. Thanks. Posted by stylites on 05/09/2007 07:58:49 AM
The future is Waterworld with Chinese characteristics? A cheesey place, no doubt. Posted by stylites on 05/09/2007 08:00:29 AM
Excellent blog article. Is the man or woman on the street concerned about becoming a throwaway society? Or is China still far from discarding last year’s fashions? Are they thinking of building and renting “storage units” so people can box and store years of unused but accumulated shoes, clothes and cheap furniture? Or can they still ship such unwanted items to the Chinese countryside or sell and give away to Africa? The problem of overconsumption has incrimental ramifications. Not all are in the government domain. Posted by khavurta on 05/11/2007 03:30:05 AM
Obviously the wealthy and those aspiring to seem wealthy have a great antipathy toward used items. I would assume that there is a reluctant market for them in the countryside and among the urban poor. Solutions to the problems caused by overconsumption can always be transferred into the government domain in the form of taxes. However, society seems to reject environmental/consumption taxes and government doesn’t want them because they curb growth (leading to unempolyment and instability). Our vicious cyclic addiction to growth cannot stop, meanwhile the cost of environmental degradation is never allowed to figure in. It’s more than just the environment – the cost of all things long term are irrelevant in the growth equation. But there is no point in being an irrational activist. There are reasons growth can’t stop. Well, in this way Europe seems to have a more durable model. It’s too bad demographics will forestall the development of a European century. Posted by stylites on 05/11/2007 08:53:31 AM
These leggings are a hot thing. Widening horizontal stripes are good for slim Chinese people and they are everywhere now. If you want a sailor or prison style shirt, come to China. They were out shopping with their two boyfriends, both owners of clothing shops nearby.
The Air Jordan 1 XQ China Edition will be available exclusively on the Chinese main June 1. Styling highlights include dragon inspired patterns, laser designs, and use of silk material.
A large demographic will rush to welcome this riveting new style with collectors hoarding the limited supplies of the original. To beat the lines, try fine boutiques in Xidan or 3.3 offering “replicas” in advance of the June 1 release date.
