At fashion parties in Beijing or on terraces of art deco apartments in Shanghai, people often ask what became of Stylites. This site is still known as the first street style blog, mostly about hipsters in the Beijing hutongs. But I haven’t photographed the style tribes of China for a while, though friends and fashionistas say I should have continue. Maybe I got tired of it. Maybe the subject of China and style is too overhyped with the myriad local fashion designers, KOLs, and platforms that promote them. The freestanding blog also seems less viable in the age of mobile everything and social media: wechat and instagram trumped blogs like stylites. I didn’t come up with a way to truly capitalize on Stylites when it was most publicized around 2009. Now there’s no way to compete with the influence of the mega-KOLs such as Gogoboi, Leaf Greener, Peter Xu, etc., etc.
Stylites now contains a record of all the projects on which I’m working. And that’s exactly it. Here you can find information on the pop-ups that I’ve been doing at the Four Seasons Hotel Beijing – click on Stylites Projects to the right and this intro to the pop-up program from the Four Seasons site as well as their pinterest board – as well as what I’ve done for other clients like American Rag Cie and The HUB. The project that perhaps most excites me at the moment is something else though, something that I have found challenging to explain here.
Pawnstar is a project that I have been working on in China with my wife. For me, it’s about doing a business that relates to fashion but at the same addresses the frustration I get from being involved with fashion. What bothers me is the waste produced by the fashion industry and its numbing seasonal fashion cycle. Being surrounded by people who seem to revel in this addiction to change and newness feels very much at odds with my values. I needed to do something with a more eco or puritanical dimension to it. This has led me to move toward a business focused on secondhand, consignment and resale. This business is now called Pawnstar but it remains in the research and trial period.
Part of my reluctance to fully unveil Pawnstar stems from perceptions people might have of used clothing and a business that involves selling it. The challenge is convincing people that developing a secondhand business is really an eco-friendly move when, at the same time, the same businesses operate throughout the world solely for profit without any particular mission. Consignment shops, charity shops, and Goodwill and Salvation Army are well-established in the West and, aside from some vintage and consignment stores, generally serves as a way for people who don’t want to pay full price to get a deal rather than something that has lofty eco-principals. Depending on how you look at it though, shopping exclusively secondhand might be more eco-conscious than buying a whole new wardrobe composed of sustainable fashions.
There does seem to be something possibly wrong about calling our project eco when we are doing it for profit and it doesn’t have quite the glamor of clothing made with organic contain or using natural dyes. Secondhand just doesn’t seem high-status enough. The business of taking old rags and attempting to re-sell them sounds neither glamorous nor terribly intellectual. There is a fine line between low-grade merchants and eco-crusaders. In China, the traditional perspective is that these items are associated with dead people or foreigners dumping sometimes germ-ridden items in China – there’s a certain well-known scandal that happened in the 1980s when secondhand items sold in Guangdong were found to be diseased. The story could be apocryphal but it still led to the creation of the term “Yang Laji”, which loosely translates to “Western Garbage”.
It’s not as if we are doing anything new. Whether it was the pre-Meiji era in Edo or Ebay, the notion of recycling clothes is fairly widespread and well-established.
In a sense, I want people to start buying secondhand not because it is cool and vintage but because it is eco. But maybe the only way to do that is if it is cool. This is the fundamental contradiction always in my mind. We have to make use of cool, but I want people to do it to be uncool. I want to make people question the whole fashion system with the pathological desire to buy new things that it implants in people. I want a fundamental part of our marketing to be a pledge not to buy new things.
Pawnstar has been evolving in a way that is organic rather than investment driven, which has its advantages and its pitfalls. We still don’t have a logo. We don’t have a website. We haven’t really found the platform that we want to use. It’s been a sort of trial and error with Jane, my wife, doing most of both. The personal wechat is being used to sell items while the official account is for more general content. There is also a taobao store. But these may not be the ideal platforms.
So in a sense we are not trying to create anything new. We are rather trying to create something new for China and change people’s minds in the process. To attack consumerism and the need for the newest and latest even as it is starting. Even though we are telling people to consume our goods, we need to be a platform that discourage frequent consumption of first-hand items.
With social media, which I often feel has been the bane of Stylites so strong, I found it encouraging to read this quote on the New York Times website:
“Social media is the laxative of the fashion system. It makes everyone digest everything so much faster: trends, product discovery.”
This is by Scott Galloway, the founder and chairman of the digital consultancy L2. The dominance of social media makes our mission even more imperative.
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