Changzhou Fashion Week

I had heard rumors that there was a sort of fashion week around the school where the kids from the art school would show off some of the fashion stuff they’d done with a runway and a few of the students acting as models. In some ways I guess it makes sense Chinese girls could make perfect models. Super thin is there body goal already, they think exercise is a bad idea, and even though most are still fairly short with 1.3 billion people there are going to be enough tall people around for a show. I had heard about this all though so I wasn’t so surprised when one day passing the basketball courts I noticed a lot of commotion going on. There was a big stage set up with a runway right in the middle of where the courts usually where and a ton of students were standing around. The students had gotten up on stairs and exercise equipment and anything else they could find to get a better view at what was going on. Now there are actually a fairly large number of things that go on at the school from week to week but no one ever sees fit to tell us, and there isn’t exactly a calendar of events so I end up missing a lot of them if I don’t happen to stumble into the middle of it. But this time I was in the right place so I sent Dave and Ken some text messages and continued to watch.

They were playing music just like you’d expect from a real run fashion show and they even had a pair of hosts. The hosts, one girl and one boy, would come out and say something, I don’t know what exactly. Then the models would come out and walk around for a while before they started the whole thing over. There were about eight models so a few would be on stage at a time while the others would by changing in a tent they had erected in back of the stage. The other big commotion was that they were giving away bags filled with fashion accessories to all the girls who came by. With all the going on it was mobbed around the stage. I talked to one of Dave’s students who had a bag and took a picture of her with it. The really funny thing that you can see on the first video is that there are basketball games going on still during this all. Every once in a while you’d see a ball flying around in the background. I was just waiting for one of the models to get hit with a ball. I think the students doing the announcing were from the school but there was some debate as to if the models were. The whole thing seemed to be put on by a cosmetics or fashion company of some kind.

Toward the end they had all the models come out and then they had a bunch of boys from the crowd go up and give a flower to whichever one they liked the most. This was of course done just in case the whole thing wasn’t sexist enough to begin with, patriarchy doesn’t just happen you have to put some work into it. The other odd thing about that is of the two or three girls to get the most flowers, me Dave and Ken all though that the one with I think the most flowers wasn’t that pretty and mostly just looked like she was twelve. Some parts of attraction are genetic and immutable but clearly some stuff is cultural also since I just couldn’t see why so many of these Chinese guys thought this girl was pretty. On the other hand most of the girls who got a lot of flowers were the ones that I thought were better looking also. They also did a thing, it’s in the second video, where they had a bunch of the guys come up and try to walk along the runway. That wasn’t really as funny as it might sound though since most of the guys were too nervous to do much of anything. While fashion week in Changzhou may have only lasted about three hours I’m willing to call it a success.