Chinese Fashion or Chaos in Clothing

Since visiting China, a number of things have occurred to me about the city's fashion- Primarily, its absence.

Which is not to say that Chinese people don't have taste or class or a value for aesthetics. On the contrary, the Chinese are very much interested in saving face and looking good in the eyes of others. Although, to look around you might not know it.

And this is because of a universal chaos in their clothes. There are no recurring themes. There are no through lines. no trends. no patterns. Every person on the street is dressed haphazardly. Which is not to say that they're sloppy or unkempt or poorly dressed. It's more to say that the only universal thing about chinese ensembles is their dissimilarities.

Perhaps this observation is superficial. In fact, it is. But it's easy to forget the subtle tools you use every day to figure other people out. Clothes allow you to decode foreign social structures. When travelling in China or Europe or even a few towns over in America, you begin to learn who someone is by the way they present themselves. People in business suits. People in jeans . People in scrubs. A person's threads say a great deal about what they do and who they are. So, in a country where all the clothes say about a person is that they're dressed, you must look elsewhere for expressions of identity.