Fashion

 Here are a couple of observations about local fashion.  The first point is about glasses.  The second is about T-shirts.

If you look in the photo below, you see a good looking young man wearing glasses.  He looks reasonably intelligent.....until you get close enough to see his glasses have no lenses.  He is wearing empty frames.  Huge, empty frames.

Why is he wearing frames with no lenses?

Now, this is not a rare thing to see in China.  You see it quite a bit in Japan, too.  It's a trend for young people to wear glasses with no lenses.  By young, I mean people that appear to be between 12 and 32 years old.  (It's not just the school kids.)  Most often, you will see this on the ladies.  But now and then you will find a fashionable fellow like the one in the photo above.

Helen Reddy claimed "I Am Woman".  This lady claims "I Am A$*H*L*"

 Now, on to the t-shirts.  Here in China, it seems to be very fashionable to wear a shirt with something readable on it.  That something readable might be a brand name (Abercrombie and Fitch) or a school insignia (Harvard) or some kind of message (I Climbed the Great Wall).  Very rarely do you see Chinese people wearing clothing emblazoned with Chinese writing.  Most of the times, the words are English. French words are popular also.  In some cases, it is hard to figure out whether any real words are involved at all.  Grammar is often warped and misspellings are frequent.  Sometimes things are so mangled as to be unintelligible.  It seems that any arrangement of our alphabet will do.

Here is what I think is going on.  Some people buy legitimate brands like Nike and Lacoste in the malls.  Others are buying knock-offs, and the knock-off artists are not very good with their spelling.  Then, on top of it all, I think that much of the American novelty t-shirt market is supplied by factories in China.  And I suspect that many of these factories end up with a lot of "factory seconds" which can not be exported - either because of production overruns or because they've screwed up the graphics so badly that the customer would not accept the goods. All of these factory seconds probably end up getting sold in China.

 I've got to believe that the vast majority of Chinese people have little understanding of what their t-shirts are trying to say.  Even if they are able to read English very well,  the nuances of t-shirt humor and gutter language probably go right over their heads.   One day I saw one of the elderly landscaping ladies, a woman who looked to be in her 70's, wearing a t-shirt that prominently featured the "F" bomb.

Where do these shirts come from?