Sartorial behaviour in China has a quirky ‘seam about it. It spans the glass bridge (there are many in China) of Chinese leaders in Mao suits walking in and out of government offices around Tiananmen Square to the damsel, not necessarily in distress, giving you a leg up in hot pants. A dress culture that borrows directly from the West proves that the sociological adage of 'westernisation not being the same as modernisation' is for all to see in the worlds second largest economy.
The modern Chinese way of dressing is typically Western. And is slowly getting closer to the grunge look. Women who rule the roost in the country that has a seven-men ruling elite like to flash their legs as much as the men like to rev up their bikes and cars. However, the core of the Confucian society is largely conservative.
A special administrative region of China once smoked through the ears and the fumes reached Versace some time ago. The Italian couture label was at the receiving end of China's nationalistic fervour when netizens took umbrage to a Versace T-shirt showing Hong Kong as a country.
China is a civilisational state, one in which tradition works to form the building blocks of statehood, markedly different from a nation-state. Millennia of civilization have seen the country move through a flux in the sphere of history, identity and culture.
What works in the gilded malls of the nation of 1.4 billion wouldn't surprise a follower of marketing Guru Philip Kotler, but such an elevated soul is hard to come by in a country that claims to live by the notion of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'. With the West decrying the civilisational state for following state capitalism, it is easy to trip over misunderstandings.
It's not the first time that a label has fallen foul of naysayers in a country that swears by its own Luckin Coffee, a take on Starbucks, and Li-Ning, founded by the Olympic basketball star. Someone sometime wrote about the propensity of the Chinese consumer to buy with bundles (or is it bales) of cash.
In the Theory of the Leisure Class, American philosopher, economist, and thinker Thorstein Veblen founded the term Conspicuous Consumption. The celebrated work would span evolutionary biology and economics and offer the scholar of Norwegian descent a deep insight into what would later make academic history.
We don't buy products, but ideas and institutions, has been the standard refrain of the marketer and behavioural scientists. So, when one runs amok in a Starbucks outlet, a number of Chinese did some years ago, they are not inviting the apocalypse for that porcelain tumbler. I saw a pink one grace the shelf at an outlet of the American coffee chain. The 350 ml mug would cost you a cool 399 yuan, and before you spill the hot coffee you are holding, Adam Smith's ‘invisible hand' is here, making you realise that life chokes in the absence of the law of demand and supply.
The scrum of young Chinese men and women brimming with excitement for the Starbucks merchandise and breaking quite a few items displayed pecuniary bellicosity.
Cultures can be broadly divided into three types ideal, ideational and sensate. The pattern of consumption that shows itself in the acquisition of ‘cultural' items and those with 'flaunt and squander value' largely determines the type. With the marked rise of transnational brands and their vaulting marketing ambitions, cultures have become vulnerable to being easily slotted into the sensate type.
Ideal cultures practically don't exist. The times of Confucius, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and the Vedic civilization on the Indian subcontinent would come close. The ideational type is given to thinking and contemplation. French philosopher Descartes would agree. So will Russia that nurtured Tolstoy, and the Germans who swore by Immanuel Kant.
In stark relief, a sensate culture is marked by an obsessive attachment to material objects, which often take the shape of 'cultural items' like flamboyant attire, garish footwear, flashy cars and the like. Jewellery fits the bill in Western societies, but not on the Indian subcontinent where it could often be a cultural necessity.
Eastern societies (China is the core nation) are given to an attachment to materialistic symbols. Consumers in East Asian nations such as South Korea, Philippines, Singapore and China are known to overtly desire success symbols in material objects and lay more emphasis on linking happiness to external symbols.
The Filipino diaspora spread across the world is largely known to live their life and embrace a highly liberal value system.
In China, the propensity to consume is high and prices are linked not only to the cost of production but to status symbol and the pleasure an item can bring to a nation always in the throes of a tug of war with the West. What the political class thinks of the habits of Gen Z, which often likes to shun traditional responsibilities and take pleasure in the present is hard to fathom, but it is clear that they may not be entirely wrong in saying, "look before you leap".
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