Shanghai and Chinese Clothing

Shanghai in some senses is barely China. I’m sure depending on your reasons for being there you could spend every day there for years telling yourself you were in a western city. The roads are narrow and lined by either 19th century European architecture built by the various colonial powers or by brand new skyscrapers. There are no bike lanes, and the people of the city, unlike the city folk of the other Chinese cities, show signs of being jaded and hardened by city life the way New Yorkers do. There are plenty of westerners trapsing around, so children do not think to point and people do not stare until noticed like elsewhere in china. you are just another waiguoren.



The city is unbelievably sprawling, and the subway system is still being built and is still inadeaquate. Due to traffic and the sheer size of the city, taxis are a luxury of foreigners and the almost rich. It rains almost 150 days of the year, and it is common for the sun to not shine for a whole month. Fog is heavy and often disrupts traffic. We sat for an hour in a standstill on an arterial highway one day due to how thick the fog was further up the road.



culturally, shanghai is a city of massive hype and future expectation. while it has a manhattan style financial dominance over the mainland, it does not share manhattans cultural hegemony. It displays its monetary advantage in terms of gardens and parks and skyscrapers quite undeniably, but in many senses, the fashion and cultural activities and life of the city are at best a peer to Beijing's. At its worst, a gross majority of the city is monotonous and homogenous with the same small shops selling the exact same knock off merchandise and hardware and the exact same drab blank walled corner eateries cranking out identical soup dumplings block after block mile after mile after mile.

In the rich areas of the city, there are two main roads for higher class consumption. Nanjing Lu cuts through the city East West and is the home of literally hundreds and hundreds of high end genuine merchandise fashion boutiques and department stores. It is intensely crowded come prime time with thousands and thousands of people wandering and consuming amidst bright flourescent lights and loud musical advertisements. The main patrons of this road are foreigners or rich domestic tourists and the stores are priced accordingly. Every day thousands of rural people sneak into the city and come to this street to stand around and approach rich tourists to attempt to hawk DVDs fake watches anything and everything. They are not actually city folk and therefore know little of city folk and their methods of approach are usually quite offensive to people accustomed to civil methods of consumer interactions.

Huaihai road lies 3-4 blocks to the south. It does not run as perfectly east west as nanjing lu, sitting skewed more northeast/southwest, nor does it extend as far in either direction. this road is where the local middle and upper class buys clothing. The style of boutiques overlaps some with nanjing, but are a bit more low key. The scene to understand is relatively universal:

Successful businessman (foreign or han) parading his barely educated tall beautiful lithe Han wife around, both in ostentatious clothing, looking to buy more ostentatious clothing. Do not underestimate the Chinese ability to tolerate, wear, and expect ostentatious clothing. many young single men cover themselves head to toe in outfits so absurd and effeminate that they would get heckled and belittled by manhattan gays. Perhaps since homosexuality does not actually officially exist in china, the phenomenon of the "metrosexual" spiraled incredibly out of control with no fear of lines to cross.

Do not misunderstand though, concerning outfits and dress, chinese society is highly conservative. there are a very very finite number of jacket types and shirt types and styles of jeans and hair, and everyone stays strictly within them. methods of personal expression are limited very much to just picking and choosing different ideas from the acceptable set of ideas and arranging your selection of hair choice and jean choice to attempt to satisfy individualism. Perhaps this is not radically different than the american system, but in America, the variety of ethnic backrounds, more robust dispersal of class, and limitless subcultures seems to hide the concept better. In Chinese cities, the only visible people are millions and millions of lower middle class socially conservative Han people.

Changle road offers more edgy clothing. The boutiques are more adventurous than their conservative han targeted counterparts elsewhere. There are a few skateboard shops with imported american skateboard subculture clothing. The clerks at these skate shops brought to light for me a wonderful irony of contemporary chinese-american relations:

A vast majority of American clothing is currently manufactured in China, but is not assembled 100% until it reaches in America. Skateboarding and other subcultures with associated fashions are growing more popular in China and desire for this kind of subculture clothing is strong enough to justify selling the clothes in chinese stores now. However, the clothes must still be finished and distributed in America first, so all of these garments manufactured in China must still be reimported again and suffer both American market prices and socialist import duties. A Chinese hooded jacket might be 50-200 kuai at a local store. the American brands, after leaving the chinese factories have to be exported to america and then reimported, adjusted to american market prices, and slapped with a duty. An American hooded jacket from a company such as DC shoes or Zoo York will cost a chinese person anywhere from between 500 to 1000 kuai even though it was manufactured at the edge of town for a cost of less than 10 kuai.

-winkler