The Middle Class of Fashion

Taobao.com is the largest e-commerce site on earth. They double Amazon’s sales every month. Its design allows any user to create their own digital storefront and sell any kind of product imaginable.

Chinese streetwear and high fashion is an amalgamation of whatever is currently popular worldwide - “Tide” trends from European fashion houses and American skate brands are mixed with Korean aesthetics and Japanese street culture. The result is something as unique as it is plagiarized, clothing that exists as a sort of fashion jack-of-all-trades.

Let’s set aside the massive amount of fake clothing and accessories on Taobao, as well as the many official stores and authorized resellers where western goods can be purchased. There are countless storefronts on the site that spin China’s obsession with copying trends into a positive. These independent “Taobao brands” often aren’t even confined to the site, or to China, with many sporting their own international websites and audiences. But Taobao and its influence are at the heart of each of them, no matter the product.

Here we see three items from a single brand on Taobao. On the left is a pair of tearaway track pants with elongated drawstrings. In the center is a reversed baseball jersey, and on the right is a utility belt. It is very obvious when the inspiration for each of these items came from (Fear of God, Supreme, and Alyx respectively) but each piece isn’t just a fake. Maybe “knock-off” would be more of an accurate description. Different creative approaches have been taken with each item, whether it be materials, colors, or fit, and the result is something that fuses original elements with established ideas. And “knock-offs” from distinct areas of fashion find their way into brands such as this one

ENSHADOWER is a brand popular on Taobao for featuring a prominent tech-wear aesthetic in all of its clothing. The key to its success is taking the appearance of pieces from brands like Acronym or Maharishi. They strip the pieces of their actual functionality, leaving a product that looks cool without the associated bells and whistles(often used by tech-wear companies to exaggerate the price). However, they do offer more actual technical pieces that include features you might expect on much more expensive items such as the headphone magnet seen on some Acronym jackets.

Harsh and Cruel is the brand that inspired this article. As someone who browses taobao searching for interesting finds fairly frequently, I was surprised to find a brand I had seen on my instagram explore page in my recommended Taobao items. It contains aspects of so many brands, (A-Cold-Wall, Doublet, Fragment, Off-White, Undercover, Acne Studios, Cav Empt, etc.) that it would be impossible to point them all out. It pretty much stands out as its own entity. Like I’ve already said, notable elements from other brand’s pieces have been altered in a way that makes them unique and distinct.

I think that original brands, like Harsh and Cruel, that sell on Taobao, are vital for fashion right now. For a lot of people there are basically two routes to being fashionable: buy actual designer/streetwear at high prices or spend less and wear fast fashion. There isn’t really a middle ground with clothes that are somewhere between these two choices, at least that’s how a lot of people see it. However, Chinese brands create products that draw influence from all aspects of contemporary fashion, with real artistic visions that go beyond just trend chasing, and they sell their wares for a price considerably lower than western brands would. This “fashion middle class,” is slowly but steadily growing as non-established outsider brands become more accepted in fashion as a whole. I don’t think it’ll be long before brands like Harsh and Cruel take over the accessible fashion market.