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‘Lipstick King’ changes tune, Shanghai Fashion Week holds five-day panel to toe Beijing’s line on sustainable fashion

  • Austin Jiaqi Li, China’s ‘Lipstick King’, has gone from yelling ‘buy, buy, buy’ into the camera to advocating that Chinese consumers ‘shop consciously’
  • Shanghai Fashion Week organised a five-day panel on sustainable fashion with more than 60 speakers this year

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Austin Jiaqi Li, China’s ‘Lipstick King’. Photo: Weibo
Yaling Jiangin Shanghai
When Austin Jiaqi Li, China’s “Lipstick King”, returned to live-streaming after a three-month hiatus in late September, his studio backdrop carried a new slogan: “shop consciously”.
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The new slogan went against the very idea that had made him a household name in the first place. When Li appeared in the public eye in 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic, his catchphrase – yelled into the camera – was: “Buy, buy, buy!”

The change in Li’s tone aligns with a narrative that Beijing has been trying to push. As it approaches the deadline for reaching peak carbon emissions before 2030, it has been encouraging Chinese consumers to achieve a “green, low-carbon lifestyle”, as detailed in an action plan released last October. This emphasis on rethinking shopping habits also coincides with the rise of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) concerns among Chinese companies and investors.

The proportion of goods bought online in China has risen dramatically. In the first half of this year, online retail sales accounted for 25.9 per cent of all retail sales in the country, their ratio almost doubling over the past five years, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

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As sales skyrocket, so have redundant purchases and wasteful deliveries. China’s daily deliveries ballooned by 100 times over the previous 15 years to 300 million in 2021, according to the State Post Bureau. The government agency embarked on a two-year pilot programme in December last year to address delivery waste issues, citing obstacles such as high costs, difficulties in recycling and unwilling individual consumers.
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