Soft Power: Chinese streetwear fashion affirms coolness

There’s something strangely thrilling about lying in bed watching Chinese streetwear fashion TikToks, but lately, that seems to be all I’ve been doing. I’ve scrolled through countless compilations of Chinese influencers, serving looks with brand-name outfits and other luxury pieces fit for the runway, walking on the street in Beijing or Shanghai and looking into the camera with their signature “model” expressions.  

I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve tried recreating similar outfits at home and attempted to walk the same way as the influencers do in their staged videos. While these attempts have been mostly failures, they’ve also taught me that it’s less about the talk and more about the walk. Put simply, it’s not just about the outfits, but the “coolness” you feel when you’re in them. 

As a Chinese American, I love Chinese streetwear fashion. I don’t think I’ve ever found as much joy as I have in watching all these Chinese influencers strut their style in everyday settings. Watching these videos taught me that I didn’t actually understand contemporary fashion in mainland China, which is fresh and new and, yes, primarily defined by the context of China’s consumer culture but has evolved to become its own style. It’s especially refreshing to see Chinese streetwear fashion incorporating traditional Chinese clothing, such as reinterpretations of “hanfu” and other forms of reinventing outfits historically significant in Chinese culture.  

Despite the fact that my attempts at imitating these styles and outfits were lacking, the mere process of trying to imitate them made me so much more conscious of not only my Chinese identity but also the concept of Chinese “coolness,” a discourse that’s largely absent in dominant representations of Chinese streetwear and students in the United States. 

Dominant rhetoric surrounding Chinese streetwear fashion in the United States is usually negative, blatantly xenophobic or used to deride Chinese international students for what they wear — in these cases, both negative and xenophobic. My consumption of Chinese streetwear fashion made me more conscious of its presence in the United States, or rather, how it’s negatively perceived in the United States concerning Chinese international students. 

Reddit posts will stereotype Chinese international students using fashion, writing comments about how Chinese international students use their wealth to act superior by wearing luxury brands or “flex” on others’ clothing choices. 

“International student starter pack” memes may have humorous connotations, but there’s also a darker element of “othering” Chinese students and clearly labeling Chinese students as “foreign” based on what they wear. The idea that Chinese international students’ streetwear fashion is just to glorify brand names is a simplistic and harmful assumption to make. 

For the most part, the Chinese international students I’ve had the opportunity to meet don’t use streetwear fashion to flaunt their wealth to U.S. students intentionally. This isn’t to say that this is all-encompassing, of course. Yet to put it broadly, Chinese streetwear fashion is fundamentally based in a very complex class-oriented landscape of contemporary China, where it’s an unspoken but necessary social script to affirm social status with an external means of doing so, such as style and clothing. 

Chinese streetwear fashion is incredibly cool, and more people need to recognize its coolness in ways that don’t depend on a one-dimensional understanding of contemporary Chinese fashion. 

It’s paradoxical that Chinese students’ streetwear fashion, which is more so associated with “fitting in” in the culture of mainland China, is used to decry a perceived failure to do so in the United States. My greatest wish is to reconcile our understanding of Chinese streetwear fashion as synonymous with coolness instead of using it to feed a dominant narrative of “othering” Chinese students on campus. 

Acknowledging Chinese streetwear in China as a source of coolness can expand our transnational understanding of the complexity of Chinese street culture and Chinese culture as a whole. By redefining Chinese streetwear fashion as not a symptom of difference but of coolness, we can learn how to appreciate the essence of Chinese streetwear, which is about what you’re wearing and how you wear it. 

It’s necessary to acknowledge that appreciating Chinese streetwear fashion is not a one-way conduit to respecting Chinese students in the United States. To say so would be a reductionist argument, devoid of a true understanding of how xenophobia works. Yet I think there’s something to be said about how fashion is used to delineate the differences between Chinese international students at USC and U.S. students. Chinese streetwear and style being used as a clear marker of “foreignness” and to justify exclusionary rhetoric appears to reflect a deeper flaw in how we understand fashion and, on a larger scale, those who consume it. 

On a fundamental level, Chinese streetwear fashion is really intended to be a way of radiating confidence. Yet, to me, it’s not even really about the clothes. It’s about the way you feel when you’re in them. It’s about walking the walk. It’s about the attitude, feeling pride in your culture and the way you wear it. It’s about feeling cool, but more importantly, feeling Chinese. 

Valerie Wu is a sophomore writing about the arts and pop culture in relation to her Chinese American identity. Her column, “Soft Power,” runs every other Monday.