Written by Yan Zhuang
Uniqlo’s children’s clothing section in China has won an unexpected new clientele: adult women.
In the latest viral challenge to sweep Chinese social media, women pose for selfies in dressing in children’s T-shirts from the Japanese fashion giant. The trend has sparked a heated debate over whether to promote body shame, with experts raising concerns that it is strengthening the country’s unhealthy beauty standards.
“This is a dangerous trend, not only in terms of a weakening impulse and the pressure it puts on women and girls, but also in terms of the obvious sexualization of women,” said Tina Rochelle, an associate professor of science. social and behavioral skills at the University of Hong Kong, which investigates the influence of gender and culture on health. She said that small clothes are probably tighter and more suitable for a woman’s body.
On Weibo, a microblogging platform, where the hashtag “Adult tries on Uniqlo children’s clothing” was viewed 680 million times, criticism is split between those who oppose the unrealistic standards of beauty promoted by the challenge and those who express concern. more practical than women stretch their clothes and make them unsaleable.
One user called it another way to show the aesthetics of “white, young, thin”, referring to a phrase commonly used to describe the country’s dominant beauty standard. The person added: “It accentuates the unhealthy shame of the body and should be firmly resisted.”
Another commenter wrote: “Although I am envious of the faces of those women, they should buy the clothes after trying them on! The clothes are stretched, as children can wear them! Uniqlo did not respond to emails requesting comments on Thursday.
The challenge was labeled with the latest iteration of the “BM style”, a type of fashion recently popularized by the cult Italian brand Brandy Melville, which is youthful, casual and, above all, thin (its stores have one dimension: very little) .
Since the brand opened its first Chinese store in Shanghai in 2019, it has become an aspirational symbol for young women desperate to tighten their clothes. An unofficial sizing chart circulating on Weibo showed how much women would have to weigh at different heights to fit – a 3-meter woman would have to weigh 95 kilograms.
Brandy Melville did not immediately respond to an email requesting comments. Jia Tan, an assistant professor of cultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the garment industry is an important factor in what is considered the “standard” size. The same size is usually smaller in Asia than in the West, she said, and “standard” sizes exclude a significant portion of the population.
“I think we need to first question the immense social pressure on women and why the clothing industry can have so much power in standardizing the way we look, before pointing the finger at those adult women who look like children.” , Tan said. in an email.
Similar online challenges have gone viral on Chinese social media before. In 2016, women – and some men – posed with their waists behind a vertical sheet of A4 paper to show that they were “thin paper”.
This challenge was so popular that celebrities took part, and Chinese state media covered it, prompting a feminist activist, Zheng Churan, to write in a retort, “I like my fat waist” on a piece of paper. paper held horizontally over the waist.
In 2015, for the “challenge of the belly button”, people touched an arm around their back and around the waist to touch the belly button – apparently to brag about how thin they were.
There seems to be some awareness of the positivity of the body in China. A few months ago, a store faced a negative reaction for labeling older women’s clothing sizes as “rotten”, prompting them to apologize.
But Rochelle, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, said that while women increasingly wanted to use body shame and share their experiences online, there was little indication that society in general was changing.
“It seems that he has failed to act here, that fat fatigue and public discussion of a woman’s weight can have a major impact on a person’s well-being,” she said.
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