How Should We Define China's Youth Culture? A Conversation Across Fields | Shanghai Fashion Week

China's streetwear scene is much livelier than it was ten years ago. But a trend is only a symbol. It is not the same thing as a youth culture.

At Shanghai Fashion Week, the showrooms that host buyers' order sessions are still working out what they stand for. Tube showroom takes the "small and beautiful" avant-garde art line. The main venue, Mode, builds its authority through industry talks. Ontimeshow has bet on youth culture: rappers, DJs, runway walks by some "non-professional models" and streetwear installations have all been moved into the West Bund Art Centre in Shanghai.

On the last day of Ontimeshow, a panel on youth culture was held. Li Chen, who runs the streetwear store NPC; the independent designers Shangguan Zhe and Su Wukou; Adam Chen, editor-in-chief of i-D China; and Wu Meng, vice president of the games company Giant Network, talked about the past, present and future of Chinese youth culture.

Does China have a youth culture at all? If you define it as subcultures like hip-hop, punk and rock, then it has no solid roots here. Plenty of people know the trends without understanding the culture; plenty of others understand the culture without ever having lived it. But it is hard to deny that China has a youth culture of its own. It might be the deeply uncool gaokao culture Shangguan Zhe described. It might be "Heijie," the youth gangs a younger generation runs inside QQ, which VICE once reported on. It might be the danmu — bullet-screen comments — that scroll across online video. None of these has turned into a mass trend.

Everyone on the panel was born in the 1980s. None of them counts as young anymore. But each leads a youth trend in his own field, so it is worth hearing how a game maker, a streetwear retailer and two designers see it.

How are young people today different from young people before?

Li Chen started following youth culture when he was very small, buying back issues of Japanese magazines because there were few places to go and few people to talk to. The moment he realized he had begun to influence young people came when he started hosting on Channel V. Now, he says, "young people's idols have changed, the way young people follow stars has changed, the way young people understand the world has changed."

"I've been running NPC for eight years, and I'm sure our whole customer base has turned over. The people who came into the store back then and liked our brands — their social position, their status, their income, their habits, the way they dress, all of it has changed once already. And the ones walking in now are a completely new generation of customers," Li Chen said.

Shangguan Zhe, a late bloomer, only took up fashion design after university, and it has taken him nearly ten years to get from nothing to here. What strikes him most is that young people now know what they want very early. "When I was younger, I didn't work out what I wanted to do until after high school or college. Before that, the script for your life was mostly copied from your parents' generation, or from whatever you could see around you. But a lot of the younger generation know in middle school or high school that they want to make music, or make designs, and that they don't want to waste time. I think that's pretty cool," he said.

Adam Chen thinks this is because young people have simply seen more, and doubt authority as a result. They climb over the Great Firewall, they argue with other people, they look things up themselves. It isn't like before, when all you had was a magazine such as Milk, and you assumed that whatever was in it must be good.

Su Wukou, in a baseball cap and a baseball shirt, looks far less loud than the things he makes. He created a Fake series that copies one brand after another and builds the copying itself into the clothes. With Shangguan Zhe he made a "Non-Cooperation Series," shown at Xintiandi, and in a Uniqlo store in Guangzhou he hung up a white piece from his own label with the words "please steal this cloth" on it.

What he notices most about youth culture, Su Wukou said, is that "they like to say no, they like to push back." "Then I thought hard about why say no, why push back, and I found it interesting. Back in the days of dynasties and emperors, saying no was revolution. Seen from high enough up, it's a process of renewal — one word that condenses everything driving a civilization forward. Seen from something like biology, it is simply evolution... So from that angle, forget about its past, present or future. I keep trying hard to work out what it is, and just when I feel I'm about to know, it has turned into something else."

Wu Meng, the only one from outside the fashion industry, offered an outsider's view. He thinks young people today tire of things faster. They don't do what he did as a boy — study sneakers for months and save up for ages to buy one pair. "We used to be loyal to a lot of things. Now information moves too fast. Nobody can stay focused, and nobody stays true to you for a hundred years." Underneath, he thinks, young people today are lonely, which is why they like to share things and hang out with strangers online.

New styles and hit products keep coming, and fashion has become a surplus. What do independent designers make of that?

Su Wukou: The surface form keeps changing, because form is what other people applaud. Once you get interested in what's inside something, you find it has things in common with other things — that being a doctor and making art come out to roughly the same value. Once you see that, you can settle down and look at something properly. If you keep watching the surface, which moves fast, you spend your life chasing it, and you lose yourself and get restless.

At first I thought design meant learning the software, and once I'd learned all of it I'd be unbeatable. The moment I finished, I felt the software was useless — it was just a form. So I went and trained myself to draw, and when I'd taken drawing as far as it goes it felt about the same, so I looked for the next thing. Then I ran into architecture. Architecture gave me a lot: one wall, one brick, and there is so much in it to dig into. I found that fascinating.

Then, once I was doing architecture, I found I disliked the industry, but I was very interested in making concepts, so I wondered whether I could graft that kind of concept straight onto clothes. ...So the whole thing has been me peeling off the surface forms I'd put on.

Some are obviously still on me. The "Non-Cooperation Series" is itself a formula, a gimmick — you make it, people buy the clothes. So I'm still inside it. But the slow peeling-off is very interesting. Every time I hit the next stage and decide what I made before was no good, I'm actually happier. Talking about my own work this way — it won't sell.

Shangguan Zhe: What the internet overturned in culture is that any young person can now make a sound of their own. Music is the same. It used to be elites who made it; now every individual can put work online. So at that level I think youth culture inside pop culture has nothing to do with creativity anymore. Most of it, I think, is very boring and means nothing. It has nothing to do with creativity, design or art. It is only a matter of reach.

For the first few SANKUANZ collections I was looking at youth culture, subcultures included. Then one day I found it unbearably boring, unbearably tiring. Nothing moved me. It seemed mostly cloned. Young people don't actually need to appreciate good things. They may just need somewhere to dump their spare time, and to meet a few boys and girls through some brand or some event. It's hormones finding an outlet, so I think it has nothing to do with creativity.

There are exceptions, of course. Inside small subcultures there can be genuinely avant-garde things — music, design. But they are never mass things. A fairly small group enjoys them. And I think it's those smaller things that push the world forward.

If Vetements is a revolution

Adam Chen argues that Vetements uses very cheap-to-make things to revolt against the entrenched luxury industry. "I don't entirely agree with it. I don't think it's solid work, or progress in craft. It's metaphysical."

Shangguan Zhe argues the opposite: the concept is exactly what matters most in fashion now. "Vetements making the DHL T-shirt is really Duchamp's idea — the artist decides what counts as art. Here the fashion designer decides what counts as fashion. The DHL T-shirt is a courier's work uniform, but the context changed, and inside Fashion Week it is fashion. It looks like a joke, but the move behind it is formidable. And only they could do it. Zara and H&M couldn't. It's a historic shift in fashion, because tradition never stressed the idea. It stressed that my material is rare and my handwork took an enormous amount of time. That definition of luxury is already being replaced.

"Today the most luxurious part of fashion is human creativity itself — that your idea can make a cheap thing come alive. That, I think, is the core of youth culture, not whether I wear one very oversized garment."

Demna Gvasalia himself may think precisely the reverse: that the product matters more than the concept. He has said he is "not trying to push the boundaries of fashion," and that "fashion shouldn't be something you dream about." He decodes underground and street elements, rebuilds them, and runs them through the luxury system; talked up by the press and the trade, that became a revolution. As the editor of Vestoj put it, the only honest name for this revolution is "Vetements the brand."

Ask the basic questions, do the small things

Adam Chen finds that China's youth street culture has "relatively little that fires the imagination." "For designers here, fashion itself is the root of the subculture. It isn't that music or film or some other art form becomes your design inspiration directly."

But innovation cannot be pulled out of dry ground. "When we talk about innovation, we first have to understand what our own people are, and then we'll know what our young people are," Wu Meng said. "Innovating for the sake of innovating puts the cart before the horse. In games, I have to ask three questions. One, why do people need to play games. Two, what kind of game do they need to play. Three, how do I make the game they need. Ask the same of the clothing business: why do people need clothes, what kind of clothes do they need, and how do you make the clothes they need?"

Wu Meng thinks about it like the businessman he is: make the clothes the demand calls for, rather than squeezing an idea out of thin air in a studio. That, he says, is "being completely sealed inside your own world, fantasizing. Nobody wants what you make, and it probably all ends up as stock."

Put the same three questions to independent designers, though, and the answers come out very differently. "Luxury was never a functional thing to begin with. It's about whether it looks good, and right now looking good has become a hard requirement," Su Wukou said. "Making clothes is about good fabric and good craft — so why don't we do that, and play with ideas instead, deal in the abstract? Actually I'm thinking about it from the market's side: other people already make it that way, so how would I compete with them? I might as well walk a little way down this other road..."

"What clothing does for people's daily lives doesn't affect me much. I don't much care whether other people look good, or whether they need what I make," Shangguan Zhe said.

When will China finally have a street culture that young people everywhere love? Li Chen thinks somebody always has to go first, and that however small and unformed it is now, it has to be done. "Optimistically, our designers are already very good. What we lack is a better platform and a better media environment for people to accept them. Foreign media are already watching," Li Chen told QDaily. "But maybe we're all just paving the road," he added.

Cover and in-article images: Ontimeshow, Shanghai Fashion Week's official WeChat account