Being Chinese | If China’s love of Western luxury is fading, I think I know why

That could all be true. But might there be a small possibility that some Chinese people are also simply growing out of their obsession with Western luxury brands, just like how I outgrew my obsession with jeans?

I vividly remember the first time I saw a pair of blue jeans. I was still in secondary school and one girl in my class came to school one day wearing jeans that tightly hugged her hips and thighs, but flared dramatically above her feet. Two proud back pockets with visible stitching called attention to her bottom. Ah, so these were “cowboy trousers”. What a striking, daring look.

Jeans are literally known as “cowboy trousers” in Chinese. I had first heard of “cowboy trousers” during a short-lived political movement a few years earlier: a campaign to “clean up spiritual pollution”, which left me with the idea that denim jeans were an emblem of Western decadence that could somehow corrupt my mind.

That was the beginning of a jeans obsession I didn’t know I had until it passed.

Growing up in a small city in northern China, I was more used to people wearing loose trousers, in dark blue or grey, that left body shapes to the imagination. When a pair of bell-bottomed jeans made a bold appearance in my life, a young person like me didn’t know what to make of them. On the one hand, I was conscious that I wasn’t to fall under the bad influence of the West – that “girls shouldn’t dress like that” – but on the other hand, it was evident that the entire country was beginning to open up and learn from the West.