Oh Fashion!
In China, fashion is largely shaped by major urban centres such as Beijing and Shanghai. At the same time, more than thirty percent of the population still lives in rural areas with limited infrastructure. Women in these regions are often associated with agricultural labour and brightly coloured, practical clothing. The fashion authenticity of women in rural China is often dismissed as unsophisticated or outdated. The work explores the tension between rural and urban contexts, and between industry-defined fashion and lived fashion.
This project reconsiders their visual presence from a fashion perspective. Rather than seeing fashion as something produced only by the industry or the city, the project looks at how fashion emerges through daily life and self-representation.
Designer pieces from Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, for example, are deliberately mixed with inexpensive garments sourced from platforms such as Temu. By combining these items without hierarchy, it makes price and origin difficult to read.Clothing no longer clearly signals class, trend, or aspiration.
By adopting the visual language of a fashion lookbook, this project challenges urban-centred definitions of fashion and repositions these women as producers of style rather than subjects of observation.
