From Smart to Y2K: Refashioning the 2000s Youth Style in 2020s China by JiaHao Li by The New School

From Smart to Y2K: Refashioning the 2000s Youth Style in 2020s China Full Final MA Thesis

Jiahao Li Primary Advisor: Dr. Heike Jenss Secondary Reader: Dr. Hazel Clark

MA Fashion Studies Parsons School of Design, The New School

April 2022

Table of Contents

Abstract

Introduction

I. Research Context: Studying the 2000s as Retro Style

-A New Retro Style

-Wearing Memories

-Methodology

II. Factory Life and Smart Family: An Early 2000s Youth Style in China

-Smart in Media Discourse

-Smart Immigrant Workers in Factories

III. When a 2000s “Non-Mainstream” Youth Style Becomes “Y2K”

-Y2K Sold Online

-Memories of the 2000s in Current Media

IV. What Becomes of Smart in Y2K

-Refashioning the 2000s

-Escaping in the 2000s

-Gendering the 2000s

V. Conclusion

Bibliography

List of Figures

Chapter II. Figure 1. “Li (left) interviewing a Smart member, from Nan Fang Weekends, published in 2020.”

Figure 2, 3. “From the documentary ‘We Were Smart.’”

20-21

Figure 4. “Old photo of Luo, from ‘We Were Smart.’”

Figure 5. “Smart members making videos, from ‘We Were Smart.’”

Chapter III. Figure 6. “Tsunami wearing the necklace with a cross from OTAKU.”

Figure 7. “Top with a cross from Virtual.”

Figure 8. “Hat with a cross from EGG.”

Figure 9. “Leg warmers with skirt from Virtual.”

Figure 10. “Leg warmers from Egg.”

Figure 11. “Image from Virtual.”

Figure 12, 13. “Images from eyeellike.”

Figure 14. “Singers in Reality TV Show ‘Super Girl 2005.’”

Figure 15. “QQ Show from the 2000s, from the Internet.”

Figure 16. “Top and mini skirt from eyeellike.”

Figure 17. “Pants with chains from eyeellike.”

Figure 18. “Skirt / pants from eyeellike.”

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Chapter Ⅳ. Figure 19, 20. “From ‘We Were Smart.’”

Figure 21. “Hair clip from OTAKU.”

Figure 22. “Leg warmers from EGG.”

Figure 23. “From ‘We Were Smart.’”

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Acknowledgement I would like to thank all the professors at MA Fashion Studies who have taught, inspired, and encouraged me so much during the past two years. I specifically want to thank my advisor Dr. Heike Jenss for providing the best advice to bring this thesis into being, and taking two of her courses has helped so much in shaping my thinking. I am also grateful for having such wonderful classmates who are so kind, smart, and ambitious. Giving feedback to each other was one of the most reassuring things in the writing process. The fact that our connection started online behind the screens does not make it weaker but more special. In addition, I would like to thank my roommates for listening to my funniest anxiety issues and being the best therapists. Also, I cannot be grateful enough that in the last semester I have somewhere nice to stay and work on my thesis, having someone who motivates me in the best way possible. It now has become the best winter that I have had in years. Finally, I will always say thank you to myself who keeps going and my best friend, music, who never ceases to give me the love I need.

Abstract Recently the fashion world has seen a resurrection of the 2000s style with the name “Y2K.” In China, the fashion of this particular period reminds people of another name that is often not associated with being fashionable: “Smart.” This thesis first elaborates on the 2000s youth cultural Smart style in China, which lacks academic attention, and then explores the revival of the 2000s style in the current context and what it means to members of a new generation of young people born after 1995. Comparing the 2000s youth cultural style and its current style revival, this thesis sets out to show how young people today use this earlier subcultural style to recreate a new fashion trend. This thesis focuses on the aesthetics of the products and the virtual spaces of four Chinese independent online fashion stores that have items labeled as “Y2K.” I also had a chance to interview Tsunami, owner of one of these stores, to discuss her understanding of the 2000s style in China and its recent revival. By analyzing this phenomenon visually and historically, and comparing the Smart style from the 2000s with today’s Y2K style, this thesis seeks to investigate what fashion means to a marginalized group of youths in 2000s China, and how young people interpret and transform it into the Y2K trend to express themselves two decades later.

Key Words: the 2000s, Chinese subcultural style, Smart, Y2K, youth, retro, nostalgia.

Introduction “A wave of nostalgia is a symptom of hurt, a symptom of a culture that seeks relief from anxiety and uncertainty in its cultural childhood, in retelling stories and rehearing the sounds of the secure past.”1

On September 26, 2020 I encountered a post on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform that functions like both Twitter and Instagram, sent by someone called Fuxing Luo (罗福兴):

Notification: Smart will not have a party this year. Of course I post this notification forced by Shipai government. It was on September 26, 2020, at 9:41, three policemen with guns in Shipai rushed in and threatened me when I was at Bafang Hotel! They said Smart was not allowed to show up on National Day. My last straw was to ask if it was okay if we reported our plan in advance, and they refused immediately, no. They also searched my things without permission, and threatened me that as the leader, I was responsible for anything that might go wrong in the Smart group. I took photos as evidence, I wanted to win next time. Of course they took my phone and deleted the photos. I cannot accept this bandit behavior.2 (translated from Chinese)

Hasbany, Richard. “Irene: Considering the Nostalgic Sensibility.” The Journal of Pop Culture 9(4) (1976): 816-826: 818. 2 https://share.api.weibo.cn/share/260171278.html?weibo_id=4553552673907184 1

I was intrigued and clicked into his page, and the term “Smart” awoke parts of my memory. In fact, this word never disappeared in my life, but the way it is overused makes its original meaning blurred. Before that day I only know “Smart” as a description for a certain style but I did not know that it exists as a name for a specific subcultural group, and moreover, I also did not know that their cultural and political background would make those who were associated with the style a threat to the authorities. It should be noted that there are several wrong Chinese characters in this post. The words “police station” and “policemen” were written in a wrong way, which I assume is to deliberately avoid being detected as sensitive words by the platform and thus bringing more trouble to Luo. Looking at the photos on Luo’s social media page, I was further reminded of the fashion trend that has more recently become popular among young people called Y2K. The style associated with the term Y2K is very similar to the style I remember seeing when I was a child in the 2000s. “Smart” somehow has become an adjective for the popular but also discriminated fashion back then. Hearing the word “Smart” now takes me down memory lane. It reminds me of specific aesthetics and aspects of the lifestyle associated with the 2000s: pop music, romance dramas played on TV, computer games played with dial-up Internet access, snacks that are not produced anymore, magazines of entertainment news...... and fashion weaves through all of them. According to Luo in an interview, ever since 2016, more people started to

notice the Smart group, and it is difficult to find a concrete reason.3 In the year 2016, the members of the “post-95s” generation were in the age between 17 and 21, and they were facing the graduate examination or, if they were already in college, they were trying to figure out what they wanted to do next. Could it be that this reemergence of the 2000s style in 2016 was brought by the post-95s generation at this specific time because of all the changes they were going through? The happy days or at least days without having to think about “real life” were over, and now in their late teens and early twenties they were stepping into a new phase in their life facing all kinds of new social challenges. I recall myself looking at young people on the streets or online wearing cool clothes with strange hairstyles that I was not allowed to have or wear myself when I was a child back in the 2000s. Yet I remember how I went to explore the Internet, styling virtual avatars in ways I liked. These experiences make me wonder if my own recollection is part of the shared memory of the post-95s generation. Why do young people born after 1995 start to dress in the fashion in their childhood memory? Could this be tied to the concept of teenage nostalgia, which refers to one’s desire to be their teenage self again? Is this part of an emotion that is derived from “an idealization of childish or adolescent attitudes (such as an unwillingness to take over responsibility), age-inappropriate social conduct (as in playing video games in the basement, delaying employment or commitment), or lifestyle (such as in looking for adventure and freedom, or rather still continue living

The Paper. “ding zhe sha ma te jiao zhu chui de tou, he ta liao le liao ren sheng (顶着杀马特教主吹的头，和他聊了聊人生).” April 14, 2021. 3

with parents)?”4 These aspects could manifest in the interest and desire in dressing in the past style, which will be discussed further. Smart is not the only way of dressing in 2000s China, of course, but it can represent a special fashion as well as sociopolitical landscape back then, since it was created by a specific social group that emerged because of the economic and cultural development happening at that time. It has also been negatively critiqued and even been attacked.5 Curiously, the young people who are creating the Y2K style today, in the 2020s, from their own as well as mediated memories, as a result, see Smart style which they may once laughed at now as a source of inspiration. What are the key elements that they take from the Smart style? What do they find attractive or appealing about dressing in the 2000s style today? In this thesis, I seek to explore how the past style of Smart in the 2000s informs Y2K in the 2020s, and to what extent there are any connections, similarities, and differences between the new Y2K style and Smart style in the 2000s. In order to explore these questions, I choose four online stores that have items describes as “Y2K” as objects of visual analysis. An interview with one of the designers was conducted to learn about her understanding of the style, and her motivation behind producing this fashion. Although one designer and wearer cannot represent all Y2K lovers, the interview provides nevertheless some insights on how this phenomenon can be understood. Chapter I “Research Context: Studying the 2000s as Retro Style” is a review of Wohlmann, Anita. “Teenage nostalgia: Perpetual adolescents in Little Children and Young Adults.” In Wesseling, Elisabeth (ed.) Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia: Books, Toys and Contemporary Media Culture: 207-224. Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis Group 2017: 208. 5 Li, Yifan. “We Were Smart.” 2019. 4

relevant literature on the concepts of retro and memory to explore how they are used in fashion. It also includes a discussion of the theoretical orientation and methodology of this thesis. Chapter II “Factory Life and Smart Family: An Early 2000s Youth Style in China” gives an overview of the 2000s Smart style in China. Because there are very few academic publications on this scene, documentaries, published interviews with the director of the documentary “We Were Smart” as well as Luo, and the contents of social media of Luo will be used. Images, videos, and interviews are used as primary data, and interpretations and analysis of “We Were Smart” and of Smart style in newspaper articles are used as further sources. This chapter seeks to illustrate what is the Smart style, how it started, and its sociopolitical background. Chapter III “When a 2000s ‘Non-Mainstream’ Youth Style Becomes ‘Y2K’” turns to the current fashion trend named Y2K. I explore what this style looks like specifically in China, and its relationship with media. Chapter IV “What Becomes of Smart in Y2K” moves then to the comparison of the two versions of the style: the original Smart style in the 2000s and the reoccurring of the Y2K style in the 2020s. What are the similarities as well as differences regarding looks as well as cultural background? Discussions are divided in three aspects: refashioning the 2000s, escaping in the 2000s, and gendering the 2000s. Lastly, Chapter V concludes this thesis and contextualizes its research findings. By analyzing this phenomenon visually and historically, I want to bring attention to the overlooked style of the 2000s in the past and its appearance as “new” style now, and to show how these young generations use fashion to express themselves. As Susan Kaiser writes, “inevitably, people appear”, meaning that we all 6

participate in the visual world by dressing and presenting ourselves to others.6 This does not mean that people are only being subjective to social norms and regulations. On the contrary, people have sartorial agency to decide how they want to present themselves. In various circumstances, they can exercise agency by being creative in dressing.7 Clothing serves as a tool in constructing a sense of self and navigating social relationships. As I seek to show in this thesis, for people in the Smart family, colorful, and flashy hairstyles are their weapon against the gray factory life. To youths now who live in urban areas, however, the style brings out so many different sentiments. This style is made fun of by many who do not understand its cultural background, and the term “Smart” gradually becomes a negative adjective for various alternative styles in China. Especially for older generations, being Smart is the opposite of being fashionable, not to mention being a “good” young man who should dress appropriately. Similarly, for younger generations who barely have memories of the 2000s in China, Smart might mean outdated styles or on the contrary, a completely new style since they do not have the memories of the 2000s. It is an (un)fashionable style, but it also reminds this certain generation, the post-95s, of the lifestyle back in the 2000s when they were still kids. Living contrastively different lives but also wanting to rebel, maybe for these youths, dressing in a style from their past memories is their way to resist the social pressure imposed on them. As Pham writes, “[...] it is necessary to expand the curatorial and critical frames for how we conceive of ‘fashion’

Kaiser, Susan B. “Intersectional, Transnational Fashion Subjects.” In Kaiser, Susan B. Fashion and Cultural Studies: 28-51. London: Bloomsbury 2013: 31. 7 Kaiser, Susan B. “Intersectional, Transnational Fashion Subjects.” 6

and ‘fashionable bodies’ that go beyond and sometimes supersede institutional practices and structures of knowledge production like the traditional museum.”8 This work builds on existing research on subcultural style and Chinese fashion, but brings attention to a specific style that is very overlooked and a rather new scene that has not yet been fully explored.

I. Research Context: Studying the 2000s as Retro Style The fact that young people so often turn back to styles from the past and previous generations of youths shows that time in fashion is not always linear.9 The same etymological root of the terms “a la mode” and “modernité” signifies that fashion means newness.10 Despite the apparent newness of fashion, it is a common practice in fashion to refer to earlier trends and transform previous styles into new “retro” trends.11 Existing studies on “retro” and “nostalgia” help to understand the revival of the 2000s style in China in various ways. This chapter focuses on the concept of “retro” and how it is used in fashion. It also discusses how fashion can be a material carrier of memory and the possible underlying emotion of nostalgia. The discussion of the literature further includes a discussion of the theoretical orientation

Pham, Minh-Ha T. “Archival intimacies: Participatory media and the fashion histories of US women of color.” Fashion, Style & Popular Culture 2(1) (2015): 107-122: 116. 9 Evans, Caroline and Vaccari, Alessandra. “Time in Fashion: An Introductory Essay.” In Time in Fashion: Industrial, Antilinear and Uchronic Temporalities, Evans, Caroline and Vaccari, Alessandra (eds.): 3-36. New York: Bloomsbury 2020. 10 Evans, Caroline. “Multiple, Movement, Model, Mode: The Mannequin Parade 1900-1929.” In Fashion and modernity, Evans, Caroline and Breward, Christopher (eds.). Oxford: Berg 2005. 11 Hjemdahl, Anne-Sofie. “Fashion Time: Enacting Fashion as Cultural Heritage and as an Industry at the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Oslo.” Fashion Practice 8(1) (2016): 98-116. 8

and methodology of the thesis research.

A New Retro Style The term “retro” initially referred to the way that some youths wore secondhand clothes as an alternative fashion.12 Now it also refers to new things that are intentionally made to look old.13 This thesis looks at the current revival of the 2000s style called Y2K as a retro style, since it references looks from the 2000s but also makes adjustments. The Y2K fashion trend emerging online is not about fashion professionals studying what exactly people looked like back in the 2000s, but is more of a trending topic now often used as a selling point, and the origin is difficult to trace. This Y2K fashion is not associated with rarity, authenticity, or exclusiveness as vintage from the wine culture14, since these Y2K items sold online are newly designed and mass produced. Then what makes Y2K fashion attractive to young people now? What is the connected identity of the wearers if there is no heritage behind it? Elizabeth Guffey points out in her study of the emergence of “retro” in the context of 1960s popular culture that the Art Nouveau Fever in the 1960s is not only a movement about the old things coming back and being reminiscent, but also, parts of it evolved into a sexy and youthful rebellion. In fact, retro is not simply taking pieces of styles from the past and putting them together again. The point is to look at the past from a new perspective and to “appl[y] them in anomalous settings”, and this is McRobbie, Angela. (1994). “Second-Hand Dresses and the Role of the Ragmarket.” In McRobbie, Angeal (ed.) Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge 1994: 135-153. 13 Jenss, Heike. “Vintage: Fashioning Time.” In Jenss, Heike Fashioning Memory : Vintage Style and Youth Culture: 15-36. London: Bloomsbury 2017. 14 Jenss, Heike. “Vintage: Fashioning Time.” 12

essentially more future than past oriented.15 Guffey argues that when representing what has happened, retro invokes what will come as well, and nostalgia also reflects the loss of faith in the future.16 Historian Raphael Samuel also puts “retro” and “chic” together, and uses the term “retrochic” to stress that retro exists in the ever-changing present instead of the past, and exists in the everyday instead of only in the screen and catwalk.17 Embedded in retro could be a particular self-reflexiveness, ironic reinterpretation of the past, and blurring of the “high” and “low” art, and these are seen as characteristics of this postmodern society.18 These traits provide the possibility that retro being an active rebellion of the tradition or social norms. Fashion today has become a place where individual expression and reflection of social desires and fears are intertwined.19 According to Susan Kaiser, fashion is “about producing clothes and appearances, working through ideas, negotiating subject positions (e.g., gender, ethnicity, class), and navigating through power relations.”20 It is helpful to think here also of experimental fashion, which according to Agata Zborowska, is often considered what redefines what is acceptable and violates social norms by representing taboo topics.21 This idea can be seen in retro fashion, too. Reinterpreting a style that is passé in the fast paced fashion world where newness is valued, retro fashion can force people to reevaluate the history and the present. Guffey, Elizabeth E. Retro: The Culture of Revival. London: Reaktion Books 2006: 12. Guffey, Elizabeth E. Retro: The Culture of Revival. 17 Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory. London: Verso 1994. 18 Guffey, Elizabeth E. Retro: The Culture of Revival. 19 Arnold, Rebecca. Fashion, Desire and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the 20th Century. London: I. B. Tauris 2001. 20 Kaiser, Susan B. “Fashion and Culture: Cultural Studies, Fashion Studies.” In Kaiser, Susan B. Fashion and Cultural Studies: 13-58. London: Bloomsbury 2013: 14. 21 Zborowska, Agata. “Uses and abuses of history: A case of a Comme des Garçon fashion show.” Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty 5(2) (2014): 233-252. 15 16

Beyond designers who experiment with the past style, youths are also experimenting with identity expressions by wearing such fashion. Especially for subcultural styles like Smart, which has a complicated social background and is disappearing, the new retro style resembling it makes people think about the social, political, and cultural reality in the 2000s and in the 2020s, even if the revival gives birth to another rather different culture instead of replicating the same one.

Wearing Memories In recent years fashion scholars have started to pay increasing attention to the connection between retro, fashion, and memory. As Heike Jenss shows in her discussion of the intersections among nostalgia, the circulation of images and temporalities of fashion, in order to recreate a past or to relive the memory, people not only tell and retell stories and experiences of their parents’ generation, but they also pass on intergenerationally memories of media, visual and material culture, including fashion.22 Fashion can be viewed as “lieux de mémoire”23 or “a site for the manifestation of traces or places of memory.”24 As the materials that help our bodies to be seen in a specific time and place,25 dress “plays an intimate material role in the enactment and experience of the body and culture.”26 Various studies have examined fashion’s role in composing personal and cultural memory. For example, Emma Tarlo Jenss, Heike. “Cross-Temporal Explorations: Notes on Fashion and Nostalgia.” Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. (trans. M. Roudebush).” Representations 26 (1989): 7-25: 7. 24 de Greef, Erica. “Fashion as a site for memory: Reflections on a fashion exhibition, ‘Clive Rundle About Memory’.” International Journal of Fashion Studies 1(2) (2014): 247-268: 251. 25 Jenss, Heike. “Cross-Temporal Explorations: Notes on Fashion and Nostalgia.” 26 Jenss, Heike and Hofmann, Viola (Eds.). Fashion and Materiality: Cultural practices, global context. London: Bloomsbury 2019: 1. 22 23

uses the word “sartorial biography” to refer to the ability of fashion to record social experiences.27 Sophie Woodward in her book Why Women Wear What They Wear examines how clothing can be a bearer of memory.28 Heike Jenss uses the word “fashioning memory” in her book to show that fashion and memory are “material, embodied, enacted” practices.29 In fact, personal memory is very much embedded in or connected with cultural memory, which helps to explore “how the past forms a part of meaning-making in and of the present.”30 Nostalgia, as a part of cultural memory, is also a crucial part of the personal memory of following generations.31 Visual performance through dressing in retro styles is actually a form of following generations’ active exploration of temporality. In Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik propose that “[m]emory needs to be understood as an effect of a variety of institutionalised discourses and cultural practices.”32 This idea emphasizes not only the social and cultural aspects of memory, but also its essence as a performance, a creative act - and dressing is such a deed. According to Michael Rothberg, memory requires individuals as well as the public’s agency in “recognizing and revealing the production of memory as an ongoing process involving inscription and reinscription,

Tarlo, Emma. “Islamic Cosmopolitanism: The Sartorial Biographies of Three Muslin Women in London.” Fashion Theory 11(2-3) (2007): 143-172. 28 Woodward, Sophie. Why Women Wear What They Wear. Oxford: Bloomsbury 2007. 29 Jenss, Heike. Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture. London: Bloomsbury 2017: 8. 30 Jenss, Heike. Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture: 7. 31 Assmann, Jan and Czaplicka, John. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique, 65 (1995): 125-133; Keightley, Emily and Pickering, Michael. The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2012. 32 Plate, Liedeke and Smelik, Anneke. “Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture: An Introduction.” In Plate, Liedeke and Smelik, Anneke (eds.) Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge 2013: 1-22: 2-3. 27

coding and recoding.”33 Embodying institutionalized discourses, cultural practices, and technological artefacts,34 memory represents not only personal stories, but stories within a wider sociopolitical context. In the case of Smart style, the lamentation of the members that it can never be as popular and as respected and appreciated as in the 2000s shows the different cultural landscape now. On the other hand, bringing back this style is a way for the post-95s to perform their memory visually, and it tells a story within another part of history. One of the reasons behind recreating memories could be the feeling of nostalgia. Many scholars see “nostalgia” as a concept made by mass merchandisers who construct time and experiences of losses that did not happen. For instance, Arjun Appadurai argues that mass advertising uses the idea of nostalgia to teach consumers to miss something they never lost.35 He points out that “imagined nostalgia” or “armchair nostalgia” and fantasy are thus combined together to create more commodified objects.36 However, nostalgia embedded in retro trends are more than the capital. Studies that examine nostalgia prevailing in the 1970s US show that it is in fact a mechanism for people to adapt to the rapid political, social, and economic changes, because of which “the present is perceived as being so different from the past that past experience becomes increasingly useless, and the future is imagined as so different Rothberg, Michael. “Introduction: Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire.” Yale French Studies (118/119) (2010): 3-12: 8-9, quoted in Plate, Liedeke and Smelik, Anneke, “Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture: An Introduction.”: 3. 34 Plate, Liedeke and Smelik, Anneke. “Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture: An Introduction.” 35 Maurice, Halbwachs. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row 1980, quoted in Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1996. 36 Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. 33

from the present that it seems impossible to come up with long-range expectations.”37 It is even more so today because of globalization and the use of the Internet starting from the 1990s. Retro can be a way for this fast developing society to reevaluate and retell its own history and then to come to terms with the modern past.38 Facing the society that is already unrecognizable from what they used to know as children, young people now could turn to nostalgia as a safe place. They dream of and imitate the past that might be magnified and prettified in some ways.39 Focusing on solely parts of the memories, they long for a past that is appealing but also suspicious.40 Could fashion be such a place that contains the memories? In this sense, nostalgia is processed not passively as information given by advertisements, but entails various possibilities of interpretations and new experiences in the present.41 In Becker’s words, this kind of practice “might not have been as rebellious and original as rock and roll had been the first time around, but it too was a sign of opposition to the cultural mainstream.”42 The idea that nostalgia could be a marketing strategy or could also be used for emotional purpose provides possible explanations of the meanings of Y2K style. Chinese youths in urban areas nowadays wearing styles from the 2000s show this connection between the past and present, and fashion’s ability to form cultural memories. Y2K as a selling point nowadays may Becker, Tobias. “The Meanings of Nostalgia: Genealogy and Critique.” History and Theory 57(2) (2018): 234-250: 245. 38 Jameson, Frederic. “Nostalgia for the Present.” In Jameson, Frederic Post Modernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press 1991. 39 Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York and London: Macmillan 1979. 40 Jenss, Heike. “Cross-Temporal Explorations: Notes on Fashion and Nostalgia.” Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty 4(1-2) (2013): 107-124. 41 Jenss, Heike. “Cross-Temporal Explorations: Notes on Fashion and Nostalgia.” 42 Becker, Tobias. “The Meanings of Nostalgia: Genealogy and Critique.” History and Theory 57(2) (2018): 234-250: 247. 37

exemplify the commodification of memory and time, but in addition, this thesis wants to show how this retro style can also be interpreted as an emotional reaction to the social changes young people go through. Personally, I have experiences of buying items from online stores of Y2K style, both in China and in the US, and that is how I noticed this fashion trend. Apart from fashion, I also consume media forms such as music, images, and TV shows from the 2000s both because I like to revisit my memories with aesthetics of the decade I grew up in, and because it is an interesting phenomenon to me. Because of the close relationship with this fashion and the familiarity with those online stores, I feel that I can approach this topic more easily as a participant or enthusiast of the culture instead of an outsider. However, my own emotional attachment to the style might impact the interpretation in this thesis, and it could take on the color of my personal memories.

Methodology Visual analysis of both Smart and Y2K styles is used in order to examine their key characteristics and to compare how the new style is inspired by the old one and what specific elements are referenced. Gillian Rose points out the importance of visual analysis, saying that the visual is “central to the cultural construction of social life in contemporary Western societies”, and visuality presents how vision is constructed in different cultures.43 Although her discussion is in the context of

Rose, Gillian. “Researching Visual Materials: Towards A Critical Visual Methodology.” In Rose, Gillian (ed.) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (Second Edition): 1-27: 3. London: Sage Publications 2006. 43

Western societies, it applies to contemporary China, too, because of the speeding up of globalization after 2000s. The images that we are shown are constructed in various ways. What we see and how we see are both culturally constructed. Doing visual analysis of Smart in the 2000s could help to reflect on the cultural landscape back then, and making comparisons of Smart and Y2K could further show how visuality is constructed at different times for different groups. For Smart in the 2000s, due to the lack of documentation and research, the main source of images comes from the documentary “We Were Smart”, which will be introduced later. For Y2K in the 2020s, four online stores on Taobao are chosen: OTAKU ( 御宅奶油 OTAKU CREAM/yu zhai nai you OTAKU CREAM), eyeellike (eyeellike 什麼是眼瞞 /eyeellike shen me shi yan man), Virtual ( 虚轨 Virtual Orbit/xu gui Virtual Orbit), EGG ( 甜心 EGG/tian xin EGG). These independent designer fashion stores were chosen because they all have several products that have “Y2K” in the names besides the Chinese term “the 2000s hot girl”. This can help to avoid the confusion of having different definitions of those terms from two languages. In addition, I also had the chance to interview Tsunami, the owner and designer of OTAKU. This can give insights in understanding what style Y2K means to young people now. Because of the time and place differences, the interview was conducted online through texting.

II. Factory Life and Smart Family: An Early 2000s Youth Style in 16

China Smart is a subcultural style that emerged in the 2000s China. The term “Smart” has been used since then as a reference for young people coming from rural areas in China to big cities mostly in Guangdong Province to earn a living in factories at a young age. The Chinese term “sha ma te” was at first translated from English “Smart” by Fuxing Luo in the 2000s, who is called the “father of Smart” and is considered the most famous person from this group nowadays.44 According to an interview in 2021 by the Chinese news website, The Paper (Peng Pai), he first used the English word “smart”, which means both clever and fashionable, and translated into the Chinese word si ma te (斯马特). To be more powerful, he changed it into “sha ma te (杀马特)” - “sha ( 杀 )”, which means “to kill.”45 Since then, the Chinese term almost has nothing to do with the English meaning. And for people outside this subculture, this term is more often used in a negative or ironic way. This chapter starts with the discussion of the media discourse around Smart style, which is essential for two reasons. First, because there is little academic research on this subculture, and this thesis has to rely heavily on documentaries, news reports, and journal articles. Social media contents are used as well, which links to the second reason. Smart was born in the 2000s, a time when the Internet was developing fast and when more people started to engage in the online space. As a result, this is a The Paper. “ding zhe sha ma te jiao zhu chui de tou, he ta liao le liao ren sheng (顶着杀马特教主吹的头，和他聊了聊人生).” 45 The Paper. “ding zhe sha ma te jiao zhu chui de tou, he ta liao le liao ren sheng (顶着杀马特教主吹的头，和他聊了聊人生).” 44

subculture tightly tied to the online culture, within which things are remediated.46 Understanding the type of sources used here helps to analyze Smart style and the group of youths later.

Smart in Media Discourse In Foucault’s definition, discourse is a system that produces knowledge through language, and knowledge is used to regulate others’ conducts in modern society.47 Since fashion is directly related to the body, fashion media exercise their power more directly to us. Rocamora defines “fashion discourse” as “a meeting of statements pertaining to various discursive formations and shaped by various fields, but whose combination is specific to the field of fashion.”48 It is constructed by designers, museums, as well as the media. The latter is now already a vital part because of the mediatization of fashion. As Eric Rothenbuhler defines, “mediatization” is “the process by which activities of various social spheres come to be conducted under the influence of the media, with the media, through the media, or by the logic of the media.”49 In regards to fashion practices, they “have adapted to, and been transformed by, the media”,50 be it fashion images on social media, virtual fashion avatar, or the emerging online fashion commerce. Thus, looking at current media

Szarecki, Artur. “Affective politics and online culture: Reserved’s digital marketing campaign in posthegemonic perspective.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 24(6) (2021): 881-898. 47 Hall, Stuart. Representation: cultural representations and signifying practices. London: Thousand Oaks 1997. 48 Rocamora, Agnès. Fashioning the City: Paris, Fashion and the Media. London: I. B. Tauris 2009: 58. 49 Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Continuities: Communicative Form and Institutionalization.” In Lundby, Knut (ed.) Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences. New York: Peter Lang 2009: 279, quoted in Agnès Rocamora, “Mediatization and Digital Retail.” 50 Rocamora, Agnès. “Mediatization and Digital Media in the Field of Fashion.” Fashion Theory 21(5) (2017): 505-522: 509. 46

discourse around Smart is necessary in such a time when fashion is mediatized and necessary for such a group that has a strong connection to online media. “We Were Smart” is a documentary made by director Yifan Li that was first shown in public in December, 2019 at Guangdong Times Museum, a non-profit art gallery in Guangdong Province. The 125 minutes long documentary consists of 67 in person and 11 online interviews that Li conducted, and 915 short videos that he bought from Smart members and other factory workers collected since 2017 (Figure 1).51 There is no plot in the documentary, but through Smart members’ narration of their own stories, the time line of the development or rise and fall of Smart are made clear to the audience. According to Li, he first noticed this group in 2012 on the Internet. He thought it was punk in China when he saw in the images youths with their hair standing up and wearing makeup and colorful clothes.52 He started to look for these youths, but it was not until 2016 that he finally met people from the Smart group and started to do interviews. This documentary once again drew the public’s attention to this marginalized and often misunderstood group (Figure 2, 3). Through 78 Smart members’ own narration, this documentary shows the origin and development of this subculture, and reveals the core of this style. Because of the first-hand insider perspective and the abundant visual sources of the members’ photos and videos, this documentary provides much useful information for learning about Smart members’ life and their

“Sha ma te wo ai ni.” https://movie.douban.com/subject/34937935/ China Newsweek. “Chong fang sha ma te: chu le tou fa, ta men ceng jing yi wu suo you (重访杀马特:除了头发, 他们曾经一无所有).” December 7, 2020. http://www.inewsweek.cn/society/2020-12-07/11137.shitml 51 52

own understanding of this culture and fashion. This thesis draws on the documentary images and interviews as a source to describe and analyze Smart. Several news articles introducing this documentary with interviews with Li and one Smart member, Fuxing Luo, provide additional sources, as well as various social media posts because the online space is crucial to Smart.

Figure 1. Li (left) interviewing a Smart member, from Nan Fang Weekends, published in 2020.53

Nan Fang Weekends. “’Mei ge wan sha ma te de ren dou you yi dian shang gan’ <sha ma te, wo ai ni> yu can ku qing chun (‘每个玩杀马特的人都有一点伤感’ <杀马特,我爱你>与残酷青春).” December 6, 2020. http://www.infzm.com/wap/#/content/197046 53

Figure 2, 3. From the documentary “We Were Smart.”

Apart from a community that consists of people in one physical location, a community can also be a group of people with the same interests and characteristics. What makes a community different from simply any group of people is its members’ sense of community, which is “the members’ feeling of shared emotional attachment, belonging, influence, and the integration and fulfillment of needs.”54 The Smart “family” as the members call it, is a community as such. It exists both in the physical world and in virtual space, including the group chats they have on QQ. In this space, they share information,55 and each may contribute to the knowledge building within this community, too.56 According to the Smart group members, they used to have QQ group chats to communicate with identified members of different branches of the subculture. A research in 2008 shows that QQ, owned by Tencent Holding Ltd., was the largest SNS Blanchard, Anita. “Virtual behavior settings: An application of behavior setting theories to virtual communities.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 9(2) (2004): 2. 55 Blanchard, Anita. “Virtual behavior settings: An application of behavior setting theories to virtual communities.” 56 Humphreys, Ashlee and Grayson, Kent. “The intersecting roles of consumer and producer: A critical perspective on co-production, co-creation and prosumption.” Sociology Compass 2(3) (2008): 963-980; Ritzer, George and Jurgenson, Nathan. “Production, consumption, prosumption: The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital ‘prosumer’.” Journal of Consumer Culture 10(1) (2010): 13-36. 54

(social networking site) in China with 224 million active users.57 As an instant messaging platform, QQ keeps growing based on users’ word of mouth, and this virtual community created virtual engagements such as searching, sharing, creating, and purchasing.58 QQ users’ social relationships are emotional and cultural as well. Some people act as opinion leaders, and others follow and share information as friends.59 Chinese social media users take importance in group memberships and relationships, and would use these interdependent relationships to construct their shared identities.60 To Smart members, their shared identity is more than their same social background as young immigrant workers in factories, but also it is constructed by fashioning themselves such as having big and colorful hairstyles. As Kaiser states, when negotiating identity, fashion is not only about the individuality, but also “involves becoming collectively with others.”61 The idea of Smart being a “family” shows how fashion helps to shape a sense of the shared identity. And in the online space, having such a style is the key to be permitted into a group chat. It shows the importance of the virtual space to Smart group. Smart members interviewed in the documentary said that not everyone is allowed to be in the chat. People have to send

Chu, Shu-Chuan, Choi, Sejung Marina. “Social capital and self-presentation on social networking sites: a comparative study of Chinese and American young generations.” Chinese Journal of Communication 3(4) (2010): 402-420. 58 Huang, Ran; Kim, HaeJung and Kim, Jiyoung. “Social capital in QQ China: Impacts on virtual engagement of information seeking, interaction sharing, knowledge creating, and purchasing intention.” Journal of Marketing Management 29(3-4) (2013): 292-316. 59 Chiu, Cindy; Ip, Chris and Silverman, Ari. “Understanding social media in China.” The McKinsey Quarterly (2) (2012): 78. 60 Chu, Shu-Chuan, Choi, Sejung Marina. “Social capital and self-presentation on social networking sites: a comparative study of Chinese and American young generations.” 61 Kaiser, Susan B. “Fashion and Culture: Cultural Studies, Fashion Studies”: 1. 57

photos to prove their identity as a Smart.62 Director Li at first tried to join their group chat, but the request never got approved. He said that the members in the group are all from similar backgrounds and it is a rather closed group, parallel to outsiders’ world. Two standards that prove one is a Smart is that first, you have joined the “family”, and second, your hair is standing up.63 For Smart members who do not have a specific meeting place, the group chat is a crucial place for the “family” members to communicate and maintain orders, and fashion acts as a tool to help construct as well as gatekeep this space.

Smart Immigrant Workers in Factories “Non-mainstream” is directly translated from the Chinese word “fei zhu liu”, which means an “alternative” or “subcultural” style. This descriptive word is more often used in a negative way to describe subculture styles such as “Smart.” The group of young people associated with this style initially consisted of those from rural areas in mid and southern China who were born in the 1990s and went to big cities in Guangdong Province to earn a living in factories at a young age. In the documentary, the youths interviewed started working at the age ranging from 11 to 16.64 Luo dropped out of school and started to work in a factory when he was 11, and that was when he started to explore an alternative style drawing inspirations from media contents he consumed: he made a hairstyle imitating the main character from Li, Yifan. “We Were Smart.” “Dui tan <Sha ma te wo ai ni> dao yan Li Yifan.” December, 17, 2021. https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1nM4y1c7z5/?spm_id_from=333.788.recommend_more_video.1 64 Li, Yifan. “We Were Smart.” 62 63

the Japanese manga Dragon Ball, and wore makeup and tattoos like the Japanese Visual Kei musician Miyavi (Figure 4).65 The photos he posted online went popular, and some started to imitate the style. According to Dick Hebdige, “bricolage” is a crucial element of a subcultural style. “Bricolage” extents meanings of basic elements and generate new meanings and discourses that people outside the groups do not understand by combining different elements together.66 Luo uses elements from various cultures together, and combines them with his own understanding of what is fashionable to him. As shown in one of his photos (Figure 4), his long hair is dyed red and sticking out. While one eye is hidden behind his hair, the other eye looks at the camera from the side with his head slightly held up. Some decorations make his face more unrecognizable. With this big hairstyle, alternative makeup, and a black top, his stare feels bold and even angry. What does he look like without the makeup and the exaggerated hairstyle? Does this style work as a mask to hide his natural look or something inside? Smart style became popular around 2007, when these young people in factories needed a way to express but also protect themselves. It is still unsure what informed the Smart style, but the culture cannot be separated from the emergence of the Internet and the popularity of social media platforms such as QQ, Baidu Tieba and Tianya bbs in the 2000s. Maybe they adapted the popular style they saw online, but more importantly, the only place they could escape to was the Internet after a long day’s Sun, Xiangyun. “Dui yu zhong guo qing nian ya wen hua zhong feng ge zhi zheng de she hui xue fen xi - zai yi ‘fei zhu liu’ wen hua ji ‘sha ma te’ wen hua (对于中国青年亚文化中风格之争的社会学分析-再议’非主流’文化及’杀马特’文化).” Zhong Guo Qing Nian Yan Jiu (China Youth Study) 11 (2013): 29-34; China Newsweek. “Chong fang sha ma te: chu le tou fa, ta men ceng jing yi wu suo you (重访杀马特:除了头发,他们曾经一无所有).” 66 Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge 1991. 65

depressing work.67 As a member said in the documentary, “Sometimes you went into a [Inter]net bar and paid for a full night, you might end up chatting all night.” In the group, the “families” not only share opinions on style, but also help each other to get jobs, or borrow from and lend money to each other. “What you couldn’t get at home, you could get from them.”68 In Luo’s opinion, 2016 is the year when Smart started to revive. He got more interview inquiries, and thus more people started to notice this group.69 Before 2016 were three silent years for him, because the Smart group became attacked since 2011. In 2013, the publication of Smart related content online was gradually deleted because it was considered inappropriate.70 They were bullied in real life, too. In order to find a job in the factories, many of them had to cut their hair and dye it back to black. Ever since then, this group almost disappeared.71

Figure 4. Old photo of Luo, from “We Were Smart.” Li, Yifan. “We Were Smart.” Li, Yifan. “We Were Smart.” 69 The Paper. “ding zhe sha ma te jiao zhu chui de tou, he ta liao le liao ren sheng (顶着杀马特教主吹的头，和他聊了聊人生).” 70 China Newsweek. “Chong fang sha ma te: chu le tou fa, ta men ceng jing yi wu suo you (重访杀马特:除了头发, 他们曾经一无所有).” 71 Nan Fang Weekends. “’Mei ge wan sha ma te de ren dou you yi dian shang gan’ <sha ma te, wo ai ni> yu can ku qing chun (‘每个玩杀马特的人都有一点伤感’ <杀马特,我爱你>与残酷青春).” 67 68

Director Li said that the audiences who can relate to his documentary the most are mainly people now in the age of 20-35, probably because of the similar painful experience at work, or because their empathy as people of the same age.72 In Luo’s view, the “older”, or the original Smart kids are those born between 1985 and 1995. “Newer” Smart stylers born after 1995 do not have a sense of belonging to the “family” as strong as the older one, and purely do it for fun. Newer Smarts also use wigs more often, and their styles are less exaggerated.73 Ambiguity appears when Smart fashions themselves inspired by pop cultures they see online. Kaiser notes that ambiguity made by individuals as they fashion themselves “may foster a kind of questioning or deliberation that may contribute to further interaction (e.g., verbal exchange) and new negotiations of meaning or understanding.”74 These youths from rural areas who did not finish school imitate Japanese or Korean pop stars, characters from animations or games with very cheap clothes and exaggerated hairstyles meant to last a long time.75 An outsider may not know if they only want more attention or if they really think the style looks good. Maybe the answer is not important to Smart anymore, for some of them only want to be noticed and cared about even as an “abnormal” in outsiders’ eyes, as a member

China Newsweek. “Chong fang sha ma te: chu le tou fa, ta men ceng jing yi wu suo you (重访杀马特:除了头发, 他们曾经一无所有).” 73 Nan Fang Weekends. “’Mei ge wan sha ma te de ren dou you yi dian shang gan’ <sha ma te, wo ai ni> yu can ku qing chun (‘每个玩杀马特的人都有一点伤感’ <杀马特,我爱你>与残酷青春).” 74 Kaiser, Susan B. “Intersectional, Transnational Fashion Subjects”: 42. 75 Nan Fang Weekends. “’Mei ge wan sha ma te de ren dou you yi dian shang gan’ <sha ma te, wo ai ni> yu can ku qing chun (‘每个玩杀马特的人都有一点伤感’ <杀马特,我爱你>与残酷青春).” 72

says, and some start to make fun of themselves making short videos to make money.76 Figure 5 is a still image of some Smart members making videos. They have hairstyles in purple, red, blue, blonde, brown, or several colors combined together. The stylized way that these men’s hair stands, and the women’s short skirts with knee socks, and shorts with crop tops look like styles that can be found in manga. It also resembles punk style in the West, but in comparison, their clothes taken alone look less aggressive, without typical punk elements such as leather jackets or ripped jeans that are decorated with safety pins. And the hair is similar to Japanese Visual Kei style, too. Styling themselves in a way that has elements of these different subcultures but is different from all of them, these young people make exaggerated dance moves with mountains in the background, composing a discordant but unique image. According to the members, making videos make them feel like someone else and happy. It can even make them feel superior than other workers. However, to make money, they need to try really hard to do exaggerated moves to impress viewers.77 This shows that even when they are out of the factories, Smart still struggles to make a living and to be understood in the society. As de Certeau writes, the isolated “other” makes use of the open cracks in the power’s surveillance.78 For those factory workers in the 2000s, isolated as “the other”, the “crack” they found was that in the beginning the factories did not care about their hairstyles as long as they worked efficiently,79 so dressing themselves in such a flashy 76 77 78 79

Li, Yifan. “We Were Smart.” Li, Yifan. “We Were Smart.” de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press 2011. Li, Yifan. “We Were Smart.” 27

way with big colorful hair and clothes like sleeveless tops at first might come from their wish to be safe due to their young age and innocence, but later became their tactic to challenge the inhumane rules in the factories and the social structures. The meaning behind the style will be discussed further in Chapter IV.

Figure 5. Smart members making videos, from “We Were Smart.”

III. When a 2000s “Non-Mainstream” Becomes “Y2K” Smart from the 2000s gradually fades away, but recently the style of the 2000s went popular again, and the new fashion trend Y2K presents a current version of how young people now understand fashion of that decade. By looking at the design of products as well as virtual spaces of the four online stores chosen, this chapter analyzes the revival of the 2000s style in China called “Y2K” or “Y2K hot girl.” How the 2000s in China is represented on media now reflects and in turn influences young people’s views of the decade and of the style, and thus the second part of this chapter

discusses the current media discourse around the 2000s style in China. Similar to the last chapter on Smart, online contents are also used, since two styles are both tied with and discussed on the Internet. Besides, the generation born after 1995s grew up along with the development of the Internet, so looking at comments on Y2K and the 2000s in general online is crucial to understand what they mean to the youths. Through analysis, this chapter seeks to find the possible connections between Smart from the 2000s and Y2K from the 2020s.

Y2K Sold Online In the chapter of her book that discusses the sixties as vintage style, Jenss writes,

When we speak about the “the sixties” we are not just using a numerical shorthand to refer to the succession of ten years, but instead this reference to time describes a wider imaginary and often mythic construction of time, or zeitgeist narratives, we come to produce around and associate with a past decade, usually in retrospect, and by way of the identification of temporal contrast.80

In fact, since the twentieth century, fashion change started to be categorized more according to the “time-specific qualities of past styles.” This could turn into Jenss, Heike. “Icons of Modernity: Sixties Fashion and Youth Culture.” In Jenss, Heike Fashioning Memory : Vintage Style and Youth Culture: 37-64: 37. London: Bloomsbury 2017. 80

what some historians call “decadism”, which according to Christopher Breward, is “a reflection of market and media demands, and its use as an artificial orginasational device, unconnected to historical events.” This way of studying fashion changes is convenient, and fashion does fit into “seasons”, but styles do not necessarily start and end at the beginning and the end of a decade. Thus, referring to the style of a certain decade often comes from stereotypes, which can only apply to certain groups from a specific period of time.81 As a result, the “style of the 2000s” as discussed here then, can only be a partial fashion image of the decade, and the trend “Y2K” is in fact a constructed image from pieces of incomplete memories of youths in the 2020s. This “new” fashion trend called “Y2K” has become popular in international fashion in recent years. Y2K means “year 2000”, as “Y” is short for “Year”, and “2K” stands for two times one thousand. The term “Y2K Glitch”, also known as “the millennium bug”, was first coined in the 1990s by some computer experts, referring to the predicted technological problem that computers and other large data systems would not be able to process dates after December 31, 1999 and lead to malfunction.82 The feared failures of the system did not occur in most major computer systems, but the term Y2K stays and exists now often in the fashion world, referring to the retro 2000s style. In China, Y2K style is more seen in women’s fashion, and the term “year 2000” is often followed by “hot girl (qian xi la mei)”. Now “hot girl (la mei)” alone starts to refer to this style, too. Breward, Christopher. The Culture of Fashion: a new history of fashionable dress. Manchester: Manchester University Press 1995: 184-185. 82 Holmes, Gillian S. “Y2K.” In Lerner, K. Lee and Lerner, Brenda Wilmoth (eds.) The Gale Encyclopedia of Science, 5th ed., Vol. 8: 4731-4733. Farmington Hills: Gale 2014. 81

In Rachel Hertz Cobb, David Larkins and Greg Wilson’s book, Bowling, Beatniks, and Bell-Bottoms: Pop Culture of 20th- and 21th-Century America, which looks into American pop culture of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21th century, fashion in the 2000s is characterized as a democratization of high fashion. In the US, some of the most identifiable items include cargo pants, hoodies, sheepskin boots that starlets wore with miniskirts, low-rise skinny jeans, leggings, platform shoes, and body piercings. The style combines both the rugged gear and the body-consciousness.83 As for fashion in China, because of the Reform and Opening up (also called Open Door Policy) in December 1978, China since then started to use fashion as one of the starting points to be a citizen of the world.84 Chinese fashion started to be influenced more by the Western World. People wore items such as printed shirts, flare pants, mini skirts, and T-shirts.85 Towards the end of the 1990s, Chinese fashion was already very diverse and internationalized.86 Since the 2000s, China keeps following this trend,87 and fashion in the 2000s China is already similar to that in Western countries. The American 2000s styles mentioned above can also be applied to that in China. These can reflect the blurring of social class in terms of fashion since the end of the 19th century and intensified since the 20th century, be it difference in

Cobb, Rachel Hertz, Larkins, David and Wilson, Greg. “2000s: Fashion.” In Cobb, Rachel Hertz, Larkins, David and Wilson, Greg (eds.) Bowling, Beatniks, and Bell-Bottoms: Pop Culture of 20th- and 21th-Century America, Vol. 6: 1477-1494. Farmington Hills: Gale 2012. 84 Segre Reinach, Simona. “The Identity in Fashion in Contemporary China and the New Relationships with the West.” Fashion Practice 4(1) (2012): 57-70; Finnane, Antonia. Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation. New York: Columbia University Press 2008. 85 Wu, Juanjuan. Chinese Fashion: From Mao to Now. Oxford: Berg 2009. 86 Bian, Xiangyang. Zhong guo jin xian dai hai pai fu zhuang shi (中国近现代海派服装史). 87 Tsui, Christine. “The Design Theory of Contemporary ‘Chinese’ Fashion.” Design Issues 35(3) (2019): 64-75. 83

manufacturing and production or distinctions in geographical styles due to mediation and digitalization.88 Today, dress in daily life is not only about expression of a pecuniary culture anymore as it used to be in the 19th century.89 Since the early 20th century, consumers’ attitude might have been changing. Simmel points out that the “charm of difference” makes old clothes somehow attract new wearers.90 Dress began to be seen more as practices of personal expression starting from the 21th century.91 According to Geczy and Karaminas, this shift in attitudes towards fashion at this time point is tightly related to technological innovation as well as globalization, which resulted in new ethical modalities because of the former.92 Tsunami is the designer of the store OTAKU. Born in 1995, she is interested in the Y2K style. Besides her fashion store, she also has other social media accounts that has shared makeup tutorials of the style. She said at the beginning of the interview, all styles in the 2000s can be called Y2K, but people only remember the most unique ones. As discussed above, these stereotypical impressions only fit into a constructed imaginary time, and to Tsunami, her fashion memory of the 2000s include flare pants, crop tops, blue eyeshadow, and all glittery things. Although it is difficult to conclude the style within this decade, and as Tsunami said, the same piece of clothing will not look the same on different people, similar elements can still be found in those Y2K Geczy, Adam and Karaminas, Vicki. “Introduction.” In Geczy, Adam and Karaminas (eds.) The End of Fashion: Clothing and Dress in the Age of Globalization: 1-4. London: Bloomsbury 2018. 89 Veblen, Thorstein. “Dress as an Expression of a Pecuniary Culture. The Theory of the Leisure Class.” In Daniel Purdy (ed.) The Rise of Fashion: 261-88. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2004. 90 Simmel, Georg. “Fashion.” In Purdy, Daniel (ed.) The Rise of Fashion: 289-309. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2004: 307, quoted in Heike Jenss, “Vintage: Fashioning Time”: 24. 91 Geczy, Adam and Karaminas, Vicki. “Introduction.” 92 Geczy, Adam and Karaminas, Vicki. “Introduction.” 88

items online. At the biggest e-commerce website and one of the ten most visited websites in China,93 Taobao (Alibaba), there are plenty of items tagged as “Y2K” or “year 2000 hot girl.” From these four stores, similar elements can be found. First, the element of a cross are widely used, as shown in Figure 6, 7, 8. A cross is also often paired with hearts, or skulls, and are often made of rhinestones. In Figure 6, the closeup head shot shows Tsunami herself wearing a necklace with a pink cross, a safety pin, and some other glittery charms. Figure 7 shows a model wearing a light gray top with blue straps and a blue cross in the middle front, and it looks like pieces put together. Figure 8 is a selfie in front of the mirror in which the model / designer wears a black hat with a cross made of rhinestones. Another widely used element for Y2K is leg warmers with mini skirts. For example, Figure 9 shows the model in a simple black top, and the black mini skirt and black leg warmers with white and gray boucle decorations seem to be a set. Figure 10 is also a selfie in the mirror, and the person is wearing a white and pink bucket hat, a pink sleeveless top, a pink mini skirt, and white and fluffy leg warmers above white fluffy slippers. Interestingly, the styling in both photos uses fluffy materials.

Kwahk, Kee-Young and Kim, Byoungsoo. “Effects of social media on consumers’ purchase decisions: evidence from Taobao.” Service Business 11(4) (2016): 803-829. 93

Figure 6. Tsunami wearing the necklace with a cross from OTAKU.

Figure 7. Top with a cross from Virtual.

Figure 8. Hat with a cross from EGG.

Figure 9. Leg warmers with skirt from Virtual.

Figure 10. Leg warmers from Egg.

In Retro Style: Class, Gender and Design in Home, Baker talks about the importance of the retail spaces in order to create, establish, and communicate the value of goods.94 Even though its research object is retro style for home decorations, it is the same for retro style for fashion, since fashion and interior design are materially, conceptually, and aesthetically intertwined with similar aesthetic and sociocultural traditions, and both, or together, contribute to the construction of a modern identity.95

Retail spaces provide “contexts where production and

consumption, and producers and consumers, come together.”96 In fashion marketing, visual merchandising is used as a tool to attract consumers and to communicate brand

Baker, Sarah. “Retailing Retro.” In Baker, Sarah Retro Style: Class, Gender and Design in Home. London: Bloomsbury 2013: 49-61. 95 Berry, Jess. “Introduction: The House of Fashion.” In Berry, Jess House of Fashion: Haute Couture and the Modern Interior: 1-8. London: Bloomsbury 2018. 96 Baker, Sarah. “Retailing Retro.”: 49. 94

image.97 In physical stores, it usually includes “floor layout, interior design, signage, in-store promotion, and product mix.”98 For online apparel websites, visual merchandising is equally important, since both physical and online stores aim to attract consumers with the environment.99 For those online fashion stores whose customers are mainly young people growing up with the Internet developing fast, it is even more important to create a virtual space that can show the aesthetics and the values behind it - values that consumers seek, and that producers profit from. Fashion is “a site of adornment, display, and desire” depending on the places and spaces it is created in and worn.100 In these specific virtual retail spaces, the aesthetics also contribute to the identity construction of a Y2K wearer.

Lea-Greenwood, Gaynor. “Visual merchandising: a neglected area in UK fashion marketing?” International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management 26 (8) (1998): 324-329, quoted in Ha, Young; Kwon, Wi-Suk; and Lennon, Sharron J. “Online visual merchandising (VMD) of apparel web sites.” Journal of Fashion Marketing and Management 11 (4) (2007): 477-493. 98 “Online visual merchandising (VMD) of apparel web sites.”: 478. 99 “Online visual merchandising (VMD) of apparel web sites.” 100 Berry, Jess. “Introduction: The House of Fashion.”: 1. 97

Figure 11. Image from Virtual.

Figure 12, 13. Images from eyeellike.

The aesthetics of the their online stores (apparel websites) consist of animations and pastel colors that remind people of childhood, or more specifically, girlhood. Jenss’ research on the teen blogger Tavi Gevinson’s retro fashion contents posted in the early 2010s says that her images show underlying ideas of “adolescence and femininity, suburban time and place, cultural memory and nostalgia.”101 These themes can be found in the aesthetics of images of the Y2K products, as well as editing of the photos. As shown in Figure 11, images of the same model in the same posture are arranged in a mechanical looking way that almost looks like repeated images of a doll done by copying and pasting, or by only changing the doll’s outfits. 101

Jenss, Heike. “Cross-temporal explorations: Notes on fashion and nostalgia.” 37

Figure 12 and 13 illustrate it even more. In these two images, the models wears colorful top and mini skirts with white tights and socks. Her long eyelashes and blond hair that is kept in a neat looking way reminds viewers of a Barbie doll. She has a non-emotional facial expression, and her legs and arms bend like a stiff robot. Both images have two identical people in it, as if they were two same mass produced dolls put next to each other. Colors such as light blue, pink, and violet are widely used in the clothes as well as the settings and the editing of the photos. These light pastel colors are often associated with females, and products in lighter colors are considered more feminine.102 This ambivalence regarding human or doll reminds us of the dolls or toys in general that we might have played with as children. And the ambivalence of being both innocent (for example in Figure 12, the checked skirt resembling school uniforms and also the white tights and white socks with ruffles often worn by little girls) and sexy (the tie-up platform heels in Figure 11 and the mini skirts and the off-shoulder top in Figure 13) presents the wearer as in-between “girl” and “woman”, reflecting a transitional phase in one’s life. It could be argued, that women of this post-95s generation who are in this transitional phase wearing this fashion may

Semin, Gün R and Palma, Tomás A. “Why the bride wears white: Grounding gender with brightness.” Journal of Cosumer Psychology 24 (2) (2014): 217-225, quoted in Joana César Machado. “Brand logo and brand gender: examining the effects of natural logo designs and color on brand gender perceptions and affect.” Journal of Brand Management 28 (2) (2020): 152-170; Lieven, Theo et al. “The effect of brand design on brand gender perceptions and brand preference.” European Journal of Marketing 49 (1/2) (2015): 146-169, quoted in Joana César Machado. “Brand logo and brand gender: examining the effects of natural logo designs and color on brand gender perceptions and affect”; van Tilburg, Miriam et al. “The effects of brand gender similarity on brand-alliance fit and purchase intention.” Marketing 1 (1) (2015): 5-13, quoted in Joana César Machado. “Brand logo and brand gender: examining the effects of natural logo designs and color on brand gender perceptions and affect”; van Tilburg, Miriam et al. “Beyond ‘pink it and shrink it’ perceived product gender, aesthetics, and product evaluation.” Psychology & Marketing 32 (4) (2015): 422-437, quoted in Joana César Machado. “Brand logo and brand gender: examining the effects of natural logo designs and color on brand gender perceptions and affect.” 102

experience or perform a sense of nostalgia, using fashion to explore the time-space between childhood and adulthood: “the passing of time in the (restricted) spaces of teenage leisure, the imagination of historical time, and the transitional experience of identity from child to teenager to young woman: an in-between-ness narrated through sartorial elements.”103

Figure 14. Singers in Reality TV Show “Super Girl 2005.”

Because of the variety of styles and the difficulty to conclude fashion within a decade, below shows one specific example of how these stores reference the 2000s style. When asked what consists of her memories of the 2000s China, Tsunami mentioned an entertainment TV show in the 2000s, “Super Girl (Chao Ji Nv Sheng).” It is a female singing competition that was very popular at that time. Figure 14 shows 103

Jenss, Heike. “Cross-temporal explorations: Notes on fashion and nostalgia.”: 111. 39

the singers who won the first three places in “Super Girl 2005.” Their outfits resemble a lot of the Y2K items sold in the online stores. For example, as mentioned above, crop tops and mini skirts are frequently used. Also, wide-leg pants worn with chains can be found too (Figure 17).

Memories of the 2000s in Current Media Discussing media discourse is a crucial part when studying Smart style in 2000s China. It is the same for Y2K fashion now, first because of the lack of academic research directly on the 2000s style, and second because of its close relationship with online media, be it trending topics of Y2K “hot girl” outfits on social media, or online fashion stores that highly rely on interactions with followers. On the Chinese website Zhihu, where users ask and answer questions, a post asks: “What do you think 00s (2000-2010) is like?”104 In the answers, many people mention the development in technology such as the Internet, walkmans, and smart phones; entertainments such as TV shows, pop music, and games; events such as Beijing Summer Olympics and the Wenchuan earthquake both in 2008. They also speak of the scene born after China joined WTO in 2001 where millions of immigrant workers take the train to go back to their hometowns before the Spring Festival. Some say that these ten years are the peace before the storm. Someone even answers: “00s is the best gift that the human history could ever give to children” because of the emergence of abundant cultural productions. Not surprisingly, this respondent is born “Da jia jue de 00 nian dai (2000-2010) shi zen me yang de? (大家觉得 00 年代(2000-2010)是怎么样?)” https://www.zhihu.com/question/456449943/answer/2143276691 104

in the middle of the 1990s and was in elementary and middle school during the 2000s. It does not matter if these people see their pasts with rose-colored glasses, maybe all of the things they mention are the reasons why people with colorful hair like a hedgehog (in one member’s own words, to protect themselves like the spines105) could exist and even be admired then and why the post-95s who have experienced it now start to look back and recreate a style from their memories. An account on Weibo titled “The 2000s bot ( 千禧 bot)” posts memories of the 2000s that people send in, with a profile photo of the logo of Microsoft Windows 98, which can represent the era. Its content encompasses every aspect of life, such as TV shows, music, books, and food. Fashion is among the memories, and it often appears in the form of the QQ Show. QQ Show is virtual avatars that QQ users can create for themselves using a wide range of hairstyles, clothes, and makeup styles (Figure 15). It is not a popular function anymore as in the 2000s when it just came out, and that is why even though it still exists, users associate it with the 2000s and its fashion. These virtual avatars created in the 2000s serve as references for what was fashionable at that time, since they are what people would like to showcase as an ideal self in regards to appearance. It also presents a rather young taste, since young people use new online social media more widely. Figure 14 provides examples of QQ Show made in the 2000s shared by someone online. These outfits are something that can be found in the online Y2K stores: mini skirt with tank top and leg warmers (Figure 10, 16), skirt over pants (Figure 18), two pony tails (Figure 16, 17), and blonde / platinum 105

Li, Yifan. “We Were Smart.” 41

hair (Figure 6, 7 , 11, 12, 13). The colors used in clothes as well as in the background are also similar with a lot of pink, blue, and purple hues. These similarities show that QQ Show, as a popular form of online entertainment in 2000s China, may act as a source of inspiration for young people now creating or wearing Y2K items. It is also part of the mediated memory of a decade’s fashion style, which is significant for the 2000s because of the technological development of media at that time. “Retrotyping” refers to “a stereotypical versioning of the past and a misrepresentation of history.”106 Even though objects shared on the 2000s bot are real, memories and experiences associated may be remediated. In regards to fashion, young people now only recall it mostly through media contents such as TV shows, music videos, and even virtual avatars like QQ show. As a result, the memories of the 2000s fashion might not be accurate, and styles such as Smart stand out mostly because of the uniqueness and its difference from casual daily outfits.

Figure 15. QQ Show from the 2000s, from the Internet. Keightley, Emily and Michael, Pickering. The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan 2012: 150, quoted in Heike Jenss, “Vintage: Fashioning Time.” 106

Figure 16. Top and mini skirt from eyeellike.

Figure 17. Pants with chains from eyeellike.

Figure 18. Skirt / pants from eyeellike.

Although not as old as the 1960s or 1970s, which people may often think of as “retro”, the 2000s now is ten to twenty years ago, and the styles back then had been considered outdated at some point. That is why a new generation can make it as a new fashionable retro style. As Jenss writes, “This is the generation of consumers who now come to remember through clothes the time and aesthetics that surrounded them during - and impact their memory of - their childhood years (including the fashion styles worn at the time by pop celebrities, siblings or parents).”107 Y2K is such a fashion style / trend made by the youths based on their memories of their childhood experience in the 2000s not limited to fashion. The traces of young people’s memories can be seen on various media platforms, and then Y2K fashion is created in such discourses.

Ⅳ. What Becomes of Smart in Y2K Y2K fashion items online have many similarities to the QQ Shows created in the 2000s, which can represent what was trendy for young people back then. This thesis argues that Smart, as one subculture in the 2000s China, serves as a source of fashion inspiration for the new Y2K style, and itself fits into the decadism fashion representation of the 2000s in China. On the one hand, Y2K has similarities with Smart, which can show how Y2K is a crucial part of the fashion memory of the 2000s China. On the other hand, although both Smart and Y2K are created and promoted Jenss, Heike. “Un/Timely Fashion.” In Jenss, Heike Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture: 139-145: 141. London: Bloomsbury 2017. 107

online by young generations, the wearers are bounded by different identities with different cultural backgrounds in different times and places. While reviving a past style, the new trend, Y2K, emerges with a specific gender connotation, worn by the so called “hot girls.”

Refashioning the 2000s Although without the colorful big hair and in nicer new clothes, traces of Smart can be found in Y2K style. For example, the mini skirt, as mentioned already, is a widely used style in Y2K. From images from “We Were Smart” can be seen that it is also worn a lot by female Smart stylers (Figure 19, 20). Cute hair accessories are frequently used by female Smart as well (Figure 20), and OTAKU recreates various similar hair clips (Figure 21). Stripped knee socks as in Figure 20 are recreated by EGG shown in Figure 22. White striped platform heels on the right in Figure 23 look much alike to shoes in Figure 11 from Virtual. Wearing pleated checked skirts (Figure 12, 19), however, the images that both Smart and Y2K show are far from being an obedient school girl. Either with big hairstyle or with doll-like makeup, the uniform skirts here for both styles are imbued with a different meaning. The symbol of uniformity turns into rebellion because of the unconventional use. Also, selfies like Figure 21 were popular in the 2000s, but is often considered outdated. However, young people now in the 2020s sell this style as a fashion trend despite negative associations. This reversal can also be seen as a form of rebellion against mainstream beauty standards. 45

Figure 19, 20. From “We Were Smart.”

Figure 21. Hair clip from OTAKU.

Figure 22. Leg warmers from EGG. 46

Figure 23. From “We Were Smart.”

According to Michel Foucault, ever since the classical age, the body has always been a site to exercise power upon. The body is manipulated, shaped, trained, and it obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its force. It is under the control of powers that restrain it and make it docile.108 In the factories that Smart youths worked at in the 2000s, workers did their job by moving parts of their bodies repetitively to accomplish one simple act every day on conveyor belts, sometimes in a toxic environment that would make them physically ill. They had to fully concentrate on it in case it went wrong, and if a worker got a hand cut, for example, he had to work more to be able to pay for the medical treatment because the factory did not buy him insurance.109 Facing the restraints in the society, still people have the sartorial agency to rebel against social norms. Although constrained by certain social expectations when dressing, contestation and individual agency still find their way to exist.110 108 109 110

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: the birth of the prison. New York : Vintage Books 1995. Dai, Bin. Da Gong Ci Dian (打工词典). Beijing: Ren Min Wen Xue Chu Ban She 2011. Woodward, Sophie. Why Women Wear What They Wear. 47

Borrowing Michel de Certeau’s concepts, it can be seen as the “tactics” employed by individual users to challenge bigger “strategies.” As he illustrates, “The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. [...] It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers.”111 For young people both in the 2000s and the 2020s, dressing in such styles is a vital part of their identities, and it could be their tactics to challenge the social structure. Fashion, as an important part of material culture, can reflect wider social relations at certain times.112 In turn, people creating their identities with clothes “is a process of construction through the materiality of clothing; it is also the moment at which the individual and the social and the ideal and the actual come together.”113 It is an ongoing process of one constantly interpreting their identity and others interpreting them with visual and material cues, and both Smart and Y2K wearers articulate their identities through the fashioning of their bodies.114 However, even though both being rebellious with some similar visual styles, Y2K and Smart are different in essence regarding their cultural backgrounds. Smart, as shown above, belongs to the immigrant workers from rural areas who struggle to pay for their livings. These workers use fashion as a means to express themselves and to attract more attention. It is about the struggle of a particular social class in de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life: 37. Wilson, Elizabeth. “These New Components of the Spectacle: Fashion and Postmodernism.” In Elizabeth Wilson (ed.) The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women. London: Sage Publication 2000. 113 Woodward, Sophie. Why Women Wear What They Wear: 30. 114 Kaiser, Susan B. “Fashion and Culture: Cultural Studies, Fashion Studies.” 111 112

particular spaces - factories in suburban China. “Smart” now often used as a negative descriptive word further reflects the cultural hegemony, which acts as the authority who judges, subordinates, and later ban it.115 On the contrary, Y2K can be worn by youths from upper class, too, and it does not necessarily articulate struggles within a bigger social structure. It is very much a trend meant to be consumed - a commodification of time and memory.116

Escaping in the 2000s One thing in common for Smart and Y2K may be its capacity of allowing their wearers to be in another reality. Virtual space, as mentioned above, is important for the Smart group to interact with each other and to showcase their style. Virtual worlds may function as tourist locations where people can “escape from their everyday life and break ‘the constraints of the self.’”117 Luo said in the documentary that he will always only be a worker in the real world. Because of the level of education he got, he would never be promoted. On the contrary, in the world of Smart, he can make progress and earn a higher rank. “So it’s better for us to choose another path. Even if it’s a virtual path, it makes me happy.”118 In Smart’s group chats, online space becomes “a playground in which they can partially strip away cultural experiences [...]

Hebdige, Dick. “From culture to hegemony.” In Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style: 5-19. Niemeyer, Katharina and Keightley, Emily. “The commodification of time and memory: Online communities and the dynamics of commercially produced nostalgia.” New Media & Society 22 (9) (2020): 1639-1662. 117 Book, Betsy. “Travelling through Cyberspace: Tourism and Photography in Virtual Worlds.” Online. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=538182, quoted in Crowe, Nic and Bradford, Simon. “Identity and structure in online gaming: Young people’s symbolic and virtual extensions of self.” In Hodkinson, Paul and Deicke, Wolfgang (eds.) Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes: 217-230: 222. London: Taylor & Francis Group 2007. 118 Li, Yifan. “We Were Smart.” 115 116

and become relatively free to experiment with a range of discursive positions.”119 In this space they are the most popular group instead of factory workers in somewhere between rural areas and big cities. More importantly, in this space if they “work” hard and long enough they will receive rewards, as opposed to the real world where they will always struggle to make a living. As Hebdige writes, subculture “can be used as a means of escape, of total detachment from the surrounding terrain, or as a way of fitting back in to it and settling down after a week-end or evening spent letting off steam.”120 Phil Cohen’s analysis on class-specific experience encoded in leisure styles brings attention to “the full interplay of ideological, economic and cultural factors which bear upon subculture.”121 By dressing in such styles, retaining their “workingclassness”, the sense of belonging and difference provide the members a solution “to escape the principle of identity.”122 Y2K does not create a community like a family as Smart does, but it allows wearers to escape in another way. Tsunami said that Y2K style makes post-95s recall their younger days. The experience of dressing in such style, then, directly puts wearers in the memories or fantasies. Dressing as a situated bodily practice, as termed by Joanne Entwistle, connects the private body to the society, and reflects the interaction between them and the influence both ways.123 In this sense, when putting

Crowe, Nic and Bradford, Simon. “Identity and structure in online gaming: Young people’s symbolic and virtual extensions of self.” 120 Hebdige, Dick. “Styling as signifying practice.” In Hebdige, Dick Subculture: The Meaning of Style: 113-127. 121 Cohen, Phil. “Sub-cultural Conflict and Working Class Community.” W.P.C.S. 2, University of Birmingham, quoted in Hebdige, Dick. Subculture : The Meaning of Style: 78. 122 Hebdige, Dick. “Styling as signifying practice.” In Hebdige, Dick Subculture: The Meaning of Style: 113-127: 121. 123 Entwistle, Joanne. “Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as Embodied Practice.” Fashion Theory 4(3) (2000): 323-347. 119

the body into clothes that have the attribute of a certain time period, the wearer could temporarily escape to another time and place. The term “escapism” now usually explains the motivation behind people’s entertainment consumption starting from the 1950s, but originally, it describes the way that the working class were alienated, and it “breed the desire to evade everyday sorrows and troubles by involving oneself in fantasy worlds that offer relief and distraction.”124 This tendency of fleeing away from the current situation or environment can be seen from dressing habits, too. Fashion as a spectacle serves as a convenient means to escape from the reality. Fashion magazine, Vogue, has had several issues featuring the concept of “escape” - if we are not something, at least we can dress as it. This is how Smart group does it, if they are not some “badass”, they style in such a way that would scare people away and protect themselves, temporarily stepping away from the reality that they cannot even provide themselves with financial and social security. As for Y2K wearers, if they cannot obtain the easier time when they were children without smart phones and stress of stepping into the society, at least they can dress in these clothes from their memories and pretend to be in that decade. Or as Tsunami said, for those young people born after 2000s who do not have much attachment to the decade but only want to be trendy, then, at least Y2K provides them a chance to create a reality where they are uniquely fashionable. As discussed above, for both individuals and collectives, what they remember about the past is rather selective. Because of this, in Niemeyer and Keightley’s words, Klimmt, Christoph. “Escapism.” In Donsbach, Wolfgang (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Communication:1. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons 2008. 124

“both nostalgia and memory practices can be seen as being essential and useful to maintaining identities as they involve the selection and synthesis of experience into meaningful narratives, and also as being responsible for social amnesia.”125 Y2K engage with young people’s memories of the 2000s China in such a way that some styles of the particular subculture from that time, Smart, is recreated in a new context. This way of bringing back only the interesting parts of the style without reflecting on its origin is similar to the feeling of nostalgia, which is “[l]ocated between remembrance and forgetting, idealisation and creativity.”126 It corresponds to what Tsunami said in the interview: “people who were born between 1990 and 2000 dig these old things out, because the older you get, you miss everything from your childhood more. The days without the Internet and smartphones were beautiful, and also there is nothing new about fashion anymore.” In her opinion, the main reason why the post-95s or even post-90s recreate styles from the 2000s in China is the feeling of nostalgia - “looking back on the younger days.” Surely not everyone misses “everything” from their childhood as Tsunami said. Only borrowing parts of the Smart style shows how nostalgia works in the process of creating Y2K fashion: “The content of nostalgia varies, as we shall see, but in one way or another, all nostalgic content is connected to some right and reassuring thing in our past. We may say that all nostalgic content makes some form of cultural,

Niemeyer, Katharina and Keightley, Emily. “The commodification of time and memory: Online communities and the dynamics of commercially produced nostalgia.”: 1641. 126 Niemeyer, Katharina and Keightley, Emily. “The commodification of time and memory: Online communities and the dynamics of commercially produced nostalgia.”: 1641. 125

mythic statement.”127 To Y2K in China, the mythic statement is that living in the 2000s is happier than being a youth now. More specifically, nostalgia shows up when the youths dress to be the “hot girls” in the 2000s. Being in their twenties, most post-95s now face the challenge of transitioning from schools to the society and situating their identities. This is also how Franz et al. define “girlhood”, which includes adolescents, teens, and young adults.128 And the concept of “girlhood” is highly reflected in pictures used in the Y2K online stores, too.

Gendering the 2000s The fact that in Chinese the term “Y2K” is often followed by “hot girl”, and is even shortened as just “hot girl” shows that this fashion trend is very gender specific. When searching “year 2000s” on Taobao, the results show fashion items only for women. Even when “male” is added to the search, a lot of items shown are gender neutral and have both females and males in the pictures. On the contrary, when searching “Smart” on the Internet, images of both male and female come up. It is interesting how the current trend uses almost only female to represent the 2000s, and more specifically, doll-like young women / girls as in the images discussed above. In these Y2K online stores, models in the pictures always resemble dolls. The style is rather edgy with their artificial looking hairstyles and makeups, but these images still conform to normative feminine beauty standards. First of all, all the Hasbany, Richard. “Irene: Considering the Nostalgic Sensibility.” Journal of Popular Culture 9(4) (1976): 816-826: 819. 128 Franz, Kathleen et al. “Girlhood (It’s complicated): An Exhibition Exploring the Politics of Girlhood.” The Public Historian 43(1) (2021): 138-162. 127

models used are beautiful and slim. Often wearing sleeveless crop tops and mini skirts, these young women show their bodies with pale and smooth skin, which are considered ideal beauty in China. Although it often promotes itself as a subculture in the item descriptions, and customers often comment “this is alternative enough” as a compliment, Y2K’s core as a consumable trend makes it comply with mainstream beauty standards for women, and creates an image of a highly feminized “hot girl.” Studying the goth scene, Dunja Brill notices the difference between styles of female and male - androgyny is highly valued for male goths, whereas ideal female goths usually dress in a excessively feminine way.129 The research shows that for such a subculture where genderlessness is the strong theme, however, the ideal beauty for goth girls are highly feminine, and “sexiness and salability” despite its dark and theatrical style are still the core for female goths.130 In comparison, female goth style is easier to commercialize. Maybe it is the same for the 2000s style in China, or Smart specifically. For Smart members, both male and female have bold standing big hair, and some of their hairstyles are very similar. The hairstyle is even used by men to attract women.131 On the contrary, Y2K is almost exclusive to only females, or “girls”, and the hyperfemininity shown in the style becomes the girls’ way to be attractive. This difference shows further how Y2K is made to be a commodity - a commodity with the coat of subculture but complies with mainstream beauty standards for female.

Brill, Dunja. “Gender, status and subcultural capital in the goth scene.” In Hodkinson, Paul and Deicke, Wolfgang (eds.) Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes: 111-128. London: Taylor & Francis Group 2007. 130 Brill, Dunja. “Gender, status and subcultural capital in the goth scene.”: 119. 131 Li, Yifan. “We Were Smart.” 129

Conclusion Visual comparisons show how Smart as a subcultural style has come into a new fashion trend consumed online. Similar elements suggest that Smart is referenced when youths now in the 2020s try to recreate a retro 2000s style in China, and show an underlying sense of rebellion communicated by the two styles, and both Smart and Y2K show how fashion can be used as tactics to actively articulate one’s identity. Furthermore, the role that media play is crucial in shaping identities of both communities. However, this thesis argues that Y2K transforms the Smart style into a fashion trend while disregarding Smart’s original cultural meanings. As discussed in Chapter II, Smart is a subculture style made by immigrant workers in China. They imitated various cultures and created a style of their own, existing in the factories somewhere between rural areas and developed cities. To Smart, styling is their way of expressing and protecting themselves, but it also strengthens the barrier between them and the mainstream society, since it is a style that only exists in neither urban nor rural areas, but somewhere in between. Y2K, on the contrary, although promoted and seen as a subcultural style worn by youths, is a style meant to be consumed. It is more of a fashion trend than a stylistic bond of a social group, as opposed to style signaling one as a part of the “family” seen at the core of Smart. When borrowing fashion elements from Smart, however, the original cultural background is dismissed, and moreover, the style 55

becomes very gender specific - made for and worn by the “hot girls.” The 2000s style revival shows that fashion bodies and identities are always situated in a specific time and place. For Y2K wearers, even though the fashion provides them a means to temporarily escape to another time, because of their different experience as individuals and as collectives in a changing society, they can never fully recreate the past for they are physically located in the now. Nevertheless, this example exemplifies the phenomenon that youths from different times and places are continuously looking to the past, with fashion being a simple access to it. As analyzed, the reasons might be feeling nostalgic towards childhood memories, wanting to escape from the reality, and rebelling against the mainstream society or parental generation, but could also be simply desiring to look cool. This thesis builds on and contribute to current fashion studies on retro style, memory, subculture, and Chinese fashion with analysis on the meaning of two specific Chinese subcultures. It concludes that in the process of remaking a past style into a new retro trend, subcultural styles like Smart are frequently referenced. This comparison shows that subcultural rather than mainstream fashion is more often taken into consideration when discussing a decade’s fashion. Additionally, gender specificity in Y2K style presents that this process is problematic, which can be further studied. This exemplifies more how memories are blurred in the recreation of retro style, and in the mood of nostalgia. As Tsunami said in the interview, in fact, many young people pursuing this trend are born after the 2000s, and “do they really know about it [the 2000s]?” 56

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201: 106-112.

From Smart to Y2K: Refashioning the 2000s Youth Style in 2020s China by JiaHao Li

Articles inside

V. Conclusion

Figure 12, 13. “Images from eyeellike. ”

Escaping in the 2000s

Y2K Sold Online

Figure 11. “Image from Virtual. ”

Figure 23. “From ‘We Were Smart. ’”

Figure 15. “QQ Show from the 2000s, from the Internet. ”

Wearing Memories

Figure 4. “Old photo of Luo, from ‘We Were Smart. ’”

Smart in Media Discourse

I. Research Context: Studying the 2000s as Retro Style

II. Factory Life and Smart Family:An Early 2000s Youth Style in China

ANew Retro Style

Smart Immigrant Workers in Factories

Methodology