The children’s clothing section of Uniqlo in China has gained an unexpected new clientele: adult women.
In the latest viral challenge to sweep Chinese social media, women pose for dressing room selfies in children’s t-shirts from the Japanese fashion giant. The trend has sparked a heated debate over whether it promotes body shame, with experts raising concerns that it will reinforce the country’s unhealthy beauty standards.
“This is a dangerous trend, not only in terms of an impulse towards thinness and the pressure it exerts on women and girls, but also in terms of open sexualization of women,” said Tina Rochelle, associate professor in social and behavioral sciences. at City University of Hong Kong, which researches the influence of gender and culture on health. She said that small clothes tend to be tighter and more suitable for a woman’s body.
On Weibo, a microblogging platform, where the hashtag “Adults try on Uniqlo children’s clothes” has been viewed 680 million times, criticism is divided between those who oppose the unrealistic beauty standards that the challenge promotes and those who express the most concern practice that women are stretching clothes and making them unsalable.
One user called it “another way of showing off the ‘white, young, thin’ aesthetic ‘”, referring to a phrase commonly used to describe the country’s dominant standard of beauty. The person added: “It emphasizes the shame of the body which is harmful to health and must be firmly combated”.
Another commentator wrote: “Although I envy the figures of these women, they should buy the clothes after trying on them! The clothes are all stretched, as children can wear! “
Uniqlo did not respond to emails on Thursday asking for comment.
The challenge was labeled as the last iteration of the “BM style”, a type of fashion recently popularized by the Italian brand Brandy Melville, which is young, casual and, above all, thin (its stores are only one size: extra small).
Since the brand opened its first Chinese store in Shanghai in 2019, it has become a symbol of aspiration for young women desperate to squeeze into their clothes. An unofficial size chart circulated on Weibo showed how much women at various heights would need to weigh to fit – a 5-foot-3 woman would need to weigh 95 pounds.
Brandy Melville did not immediately respond to an email asking for comment.
Jia Tan, an assistant professor of cultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the clothing industry is a prominent driver of what is considered “standard” size. The same sizes are generally smaller in Asia than in the West, she said, and “standard” sizes exclude a significant part of the population.
“I think we need to first question the tremendous social pressure on women and why the clothing industries can have so much power to standardize our appearance, before we point the finger at those adult women who show off in child sizes,” Professor Tan said in an e-mail.
Similar online challenges have already gone viral on Chinese social media. In 2016, women – and some men – posed with their hips behind a vertical sheet of A4 paper to show that they were “paper thin”.
This challenge was so popular that celebrities participated and the Chinese state media covered it, prompting a feminist activist, Zheng Churan, to write in response: “I love my fat waist” on a piece of paper placed horizontally over her waist.
In 2015, for the “belly button challenge”, people put an arm behind their backs and around the waist to touch the belly button – ostensibly to brag about how thin they were.
There seems to be a growing awareness of body positivity in China. A few months ago, a store faced a negative reaction for labeling larger sizes of women’s clothing “rotten”, which led it to apologize.
But Dr. Rochelle, a professor at the City University of Hong Kong, noted that while there was an increasing willingness among women to denounce the shame of the body and share their experiences online, there were few indicators that society at large was changing.
“It doesn’t seem to have hit the home here that embarrassing fat and publicly discussing a woman’s weight can have a big impact on a person’s well-being,” she said.