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 put selfies in locker rooms with children’s t-shirts from the Japanese fashion giant. The trend has sparked intense debate over whether it promotes bodily shame, with experts expressing concern that it will bolster the country’s unhealthy beauty standards.
“This is a dangerous trend, not only in terms of the trend towards thinness and the pressure this puts on women and girls, but also in terms of the overt sexualization of women,” said Tina Rochelle, a teacher. associate in social and behavioral sciences at City University of Hong Kong researching the influence of gender and culture on health. She said the little clothes are likely to be tighter and tighter on the woman’s body.
On Weibo, a microblogging platform, where the label “Adult tests Uniqlo children’s clothing” has been viewed 680 million times, criticism is shared among those who oppose the unrealistic beauty standards promoted by the challenge and those who express the most practical concern that women spread clothes and make them unsaleable.
One user called it “another way to show the“ white, young, and thin ”aesthetic, referring to a phrase commonly used to describe the country’s dominant beauty standard. The person added, “It highlights the shame of the unhealthy body and must be firmly resisted.”
Another commenter wrote, “Although I’m jealous of these female figures, they should buy the clothes after trying them on! The clothes are all spread out, how can the children wear them? Uniqlo did not respond to emails seeking comments on Thursday.
The challenge has been labeled as 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 are only one size : very small).
Since the brand opened its first Chinese store in Shanghai in 2019, it has become an aspirational symbol for young women desperate to get into clothes. A chart of unofficial sizes distributed on Weibo showed how much women should weigh at various heights per fit: a 5-foot woman and three should weigh 95 pounds.
Brandy Melville did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. Jia Tan, an assistant professor of cultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the garment industry is a major driver of what is considered “standard” size. The same sizes tend to be smaller in Asia than in the West, he said, and “standard” sizes exclude a significant portion of the population.
“I think we first have to question the tremendous social pressure on women and why the garment industries can have so much power when it comes to standardizing our appearance, before pointing the finger at those adult women who are shown in the size of the kids, ”Tan said. in an email.
Similar online challenges have gone viral on Chinese social media before. In 2016, women – and some men – put their backs to a vertical sheet of A4 paper to prove they were “thin paper”.
This challenge was so popular that celebrities took part and it was covered by the Chinese state media, prompting a feminist activist, Zheng Churan, to write in a reply: “I love my big waist” in a piece of paper that had the waist horizontally.
In 2015, for the “belly button challenge,” people reached for an arm behind their back and around their waist to touch their belly button, apparently to brag about how thin they were.
There seems to be a growing awareness of body positivity in China. A few months ago, a store faced a backlash against labeling larger women’s clothing as “rotten,” which it apologized for.
But Rochelle, a professor at City University of Hong Kong, noted that while there was a growing desire among women to call for body shame and share their experiences online, there was little evidence that society at large change.
“It doesn’t seem to have come home here that being ashamed of fat and arguing publicly about a woman’s weight can have a major impact on a person’s well-being,” she said.
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