Written by Yan Zhuang
Uniqlo’s children’s clothing division in China has gained an unexpected new clientele: adult women.
In the latest viral challenge to traverse Chinese social media, women pose for selfies in the locker room in children’s T-shirts from the Japanese fashion giant. The trend has sparked a debate about whether it promotes body shame, with experts voicing concerns that it bolsters the country’s unhealthy beauty standards.
“This is a dangerous trend, not only in terms of a drive for thinness and the pressures it puts on women and girls, but also in terms of the overt sexualization of women,” said Tina Rochelle, associate professor of social sciences. at the City University of Hong Kong, researching the influence of gender and culture on health. She said the small clothes are likely to be tighter and closer to a woman’s body.
On Weibo, a microblogging platform, where the hashtag “Adult Tries Uniqlo Kids Clothes” has been viewed 680 million times, criticism has been divided between those who object to the unrealistic beauty standards posed by the challenge and those who express the more practical concerns that women stretch the clothes and make them unsaleable.
One user called it “another way to show off the ‘white, young, skinny’ aesthetic,” referring to a phrase often used to describe the country’s dominant beauty standard. The person added, “It emphasizes unhealthy shame of the body and must be vigorously resisted.”
Another commenter wrote, “While I am jealous of those women’s figures, they should buy the clothes after trying them! The clothes are all stretched, how can children wear them! Uniqlo did not respond to Thursday’s emails asking for comment.
The challenge has been billed as the latest version of ‘BM style’, a type of fashion recently popularized by the Italian cult brand Brandy Melville, which is youthful, casual and most importantly thin (the stores only have one size: extra small).
Since the brand opened its first Chinese store in Shanghai in 2019, it has become an ambitious symbol for young women desperate to squeeze in its clothes. An unofficial size chart circulating on Weibo showed how many women at different heights would have to weigh to fit – a 5-foot-3 woman should weigh 95 pounds.
Brandy Melville did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment. Jia Tan, an assistant professor of cultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the garment industry is a prominent driver of what is considered ‘standard’ sizing. The same sizes are usually smaller in Asia than in the West, she said, and “standard” sizes exclude a significant portion of the population.
“I think we should first question the tremendous social pressure on women, and why the apparel industry can have so much power to standardize our looks, before pointing our fingers at those grown women flaunting kids’ sizes,” Tan said in a statement. e-mail.
Similar online challenges have gone viral on Chinese social media before. In 2016, women – and some men – posed with their waists behind a vertical sheet of A4 paper to show that they were ‘paper thin’.
That challenge was so popular that celebrities entered and the Chinese state media reported on it, prompting a feminist campaigner, Zheng Churan, to write in a response, “I love my fat waist” on a sheet of paper that stretches horizontally across her waist kept.
In 2015, for the bellybutton challenge, people reached an arm behind their back and around their waist to touch their belly button – supposedly to brag about how skinny they were.
There seems to be a growing awareness of body positivity in China. A few months ago, a store faced a backlash by labeling larger women’s clothing sizes as “ rotten, ” prompting it to apologize.
But Rochelle, the City University of Hong Kong professor, noted that while there was an increasing willingness among women to call body shaming and share their experiences with it online, there was little evidence that society as a whole was changing. .
“It doesn’t seem to have come home here that greasy shame and publicly discussing a woman’s weight can have a major impact on a person’s well-being,” she said.
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