Match Game

I’m trying to remember if I blogged about this before or if I just thought about blogging it.  If this is a repeat, please accept my apologies.

One thing about girls in China:  for the most part they have absolutely no idea how to dress, particularly how to match colors.  Unless a girl is born with an innate eye for doing so, Chinese women dress as garishly as mafia furniture.  Tacky doesn’t even begin to describe it.  Basically they think that if they have as many bright colors on as possible then they’re fashionable, especially if the garment has a designer label prominently visible.  It’s not uncommon to see a girl wearing three clothes from three different designer labels, none of which are the same color or go together.

For example, one of the girls who works for me today came to work dressed like a clown.  She had on a white t-shirt, a plaid miniskirt, black stockings, and hot pink fuck-me pumps, straight out of a porno from the late 80s.  It looked like shit.  As if this wasn’t bad enough, for the past week or so she’s been wearing this ridiculous blue baseball cap with big puffy, padded hands sticking out the side, sort of like on the costume of The Flash.  She looked ridiculous.

I was thinking today about why this was, and I’ve come up with a theory.  During the Mao years everyone in the country was basically forced to wear a uniform.  For decades there was no such thing as fashion.  Deng Xiaoping only began to open up the country in the late 80s, and it has only been in the last 10 or 15 years or so that western clothes have been available as we know them.  (Retail stores are a relatively new concept.) Thus two generations of girls grew up without a mother telling them how to dress properly.  I imagine that once the Mao-era uniforms were no longer required, and women dared to be fashionable again, they looked back into Chinese history for inspiration, and saw colorful silks of red, green, and yellow.  The idea of colors which match each other is not something which has much historical precedent.  So the girls of today, the first to really grow up in an era where fashionable clothes were readily available, have had no real guidance in how to dress.  They are, in other words, making their best guess.

Some women get it and some don’t.  And, sad to say, the ones who don’t get it are in the majority.  Seriously, you ought to see some of the shit that women here wear, it’s crazy.

She had on a white t-shirt, a plaid miniskirt, black stockings, and hot pink fuck-me pumps,

Looked like shit? For work or just in general. Where are the pictures?

You need to post pics of this, but I think you are dead on.  Of course, that doesn’t explain why Japanese girls have the two butt-ugly hair styles that they choose from…

What China apparently needs now are fashion magazines.

It occurred to me that if you were to actually supply a collection of random magazines to your staff, and made an attempt to update it, you might be considered to be some sort of complete hero.

Maybe ChickenFry could ship you a “care package” of reading material for you to distribute?

Believe it or not there are Chinese editions of all the fashion mags:  Cosmo, Vogue, etc.  There are also a shitload of Chinese fashion mags, and—I shit you not—the fashions displayed therein are the same garish clown-like disasters that my employees wear.  Another one of the girls who works for me has been wearing a pair of lime-green Crocs for the past two or three weeks.  With every outfit she puts on, regardless of its color.  (Not that the colors match that often.)

As far as picture goes, as much as I would love to do so, even with blurring her face out I would feel really uncomfortable posting a picture of a fellow employee.  But I will, on my nights out, try to get a few snaps of random fashion nightmares and post them.

Fellow Beijing residents who read this blog can easily confirm what I’ve written with stories of their own.

Perhaps the problem is that they don’t have access to a non-Chinese version of Cosmo, Vogue, etc?  If all you see is people dressing up like clowns, then how are they to know any better?