Escaping in the 2000s

particular spaces - factories in suburban China. “Smart” now often used as a negative

descriptive word further reflects the cultural hegemony, which acts as the authority

who judges, subordinates, and later ban it. 115 On the contrary, Y2K can be worn by

youths from upper class, too, and it does not necessarily articulate struggles within a

bigger social structure. It is very much a trend meant to be consumed - a

commodification of time and memory. 116

Escaping in the 2000s

One thing in common for Smart and Y2K may be its capacity of allowing their

wearers to be in another reality. Virtual space, as mentioned above, is important for

the Smart group to interact with each other and to showcase their style. Virtual worlds

may function as tourist locations where people can “escape from their everyday life

and break ‘the constraints of the self. ’”117 Luo said in the documentary that he will

always only be a worker in the real world. Because of the level of education he got, he

would never be promoted. On the contrary, in the world of Smart, he can make

progress and earn a higher rank. “So it’s better for us to choose another path. Even if

it’s a virtual path, it makes me happy. ”118 In Smart’s group chats, online space

becomes “a playground in which they can partially strip away cultural experiences [...]

115 Hebdige, Dick.

“From culture to hegemony. ” In Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style: 5-19. 116 Niemeyer, Katharina and Keightley, Emily. “The commodification of time and memory: Online communities and the dynamics of commercially produced nostalgia. ” New Media & Society 22 (9) (2020): 1639-1662. 117 Book, Betsy. “Travelling through Cyberspace: Tourism and Photography in Virtual Worlds. ” Online. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=538182, quoted in Crowe, Nic and Bradford, Simon. “Identity and structure in online gaming: Young people’s symbolic and virtual extensions of self. ” In Hodkinson, Paul and Deicke, Wolfgang (eds.) Youth Cultures: Scenes, Subcultures and Tribes: 217-230: 222. London: Taylor & Francis Group 2007. 118 Li, Yifan. “We Were Smart. ”

and become relatively free to experiment with a range of discursive positions. ”119 In

this space they are the most popular group instead of factory workers in somewhere

between rural areas and big cities. More importantly, in this space if they “work” hard

and long enough they will receive rewards, as opposed to the real world where they

will always struggle to make a living. As Hebdige writes, subculture “can be used as a

means of escape, of total detachment from the surrounding terrain, or as a way of

fitting back in to it and settling down after a week-end or evening spent letting off

steam. ”120 Phil Cohen’s analysis on class-specific experience encoded in leisure

styles brings attention to “the full interplay of ideological, economic and cultural

factors which bear upon subculture.

”121 By dressing in such styles, retaining their

“workingclassness” , the sense of belonging and difference provide the members a

solution “to escape the principle of identity. ”122

Y2K does not create a community like a family as Smart does, but it allows

wearers to escape in another way. Tsunami said that Y2K style makes post-95s recall

their younger days. The experience of dressing in such style, then, directly puts

wearers in the memories or fantasies. Dressing as a situated bodily practice, as termed

by Joanne Entwistle, connects the private body to the society, and reflects the

interaction between them and the influence both ways. 123 In this sense, when putting

119 Crowe, Nic and Bradford, Simon. “Identity and structure in online gaming: Young people’s symbolic and virtual

extensions of self. ” 120 Hebdige, Dick. “Styling as signifying practice. ” In Hebdige, Dick Subculture: The Meaning of Style: 113-127. 121 Cohen, Phil. “Sub-cultural Conflict and Working Class Community. ” W.P.C.S. 2, University of Birmingham, quoted in Hebdige, Dick. Subculture : The Meaning of Style: 78. 122 Hebdige, Dick. “Styling as signifying practice. ” In Hebdige, Dick Subculture: The Meaning of Style: 113-127: 121. 123 Entwistle, Joanne. “Fashion and the Fleshy Body: Dress as Embodied Practice. ” Fashion Theory 4(3) (2000): 323-347.

the body into clothes that have the attribute of a certain time period, the wearer could

temporarily escape to another time and place.

The term “escapism” now usually explains the motivation behind people’s

entertainment consumption starting from the 1950s, but originally, it describes the

way that the working class were alienated, and it “breed the desire to evade everyday

sorrows and troubles by involving oneself in fantasy worlds that offer relief and

distraction. ”124 This tendency of fleeing away from the current situation or

environment can be seen from dressing habits, too. Fashion as a spectacle serves as a

convenient means to escape from the reality. Fashion magazine, Vogue, has had

several issues featuring the concept of “escape” - if we are not something, at least we

can dress as it. This is how Smart group does it, if they are not some “badass” , they

style in such a way that would scare people away and protect themselves, temporarily

stepping away from the reality that they cannot even provide themselves with

financial and social security. As for Y2K wearers, if they cannot obtain the easier time

when they were children without smart phones and stress of stepping into the society,

at least they can dress in these clothes from their memories and pretend to be in that

decade. Or as Tsunami said, for those young people born after 2000s who do not have

much attachment to the decade but only want to be trendy, then, at least Y2K provides

them a chance to create a reality where they are uniquely fashionable.

As discussed above, for both individuals and collectives, what they remember

about the past is rather selective. Because of this, in Niemeyer and Keightley’s words,

124 Klimmt, Christoph.

“Escapism. ” In Donsbach, Wolfgang (ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Communication:1. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons 2008.

“both nostalgia and memory practices can be seen as being essential and useful to

maintaining identities as they involve the selection and synthesis of experience into

meaningful narratives, and also as being responsible for social amnesia. ”125 Y2K

engage with young people’s memories of the 2000s China in such a way that some

styles of the particular subculture from that time, Smart, is recreated in a new context.

This way of bringing back only the interesting parts of the style without reflecting on

its origin is similar to the feeling of nostalgia, which is “[l]ocated between

remembrance and forgetting, idealisation and creativity. ”126 It corresponds to what

Tsunami said in the interview: “people who were born between 1990 and 2000 dig

these old things out, because the older you get, you miss everything from your

childhood more. The days without the Internet and smartphones were beautiful, and

also there is nothing new about fashion anymore. ” In her opinion, the main reason

why the post-95s or even post-90s recreate styles from the 2000s in China is the

feeling of nostalgia “looking back on the younger days.

Surely not everyone misses “everything” from their childhood as Tsunami said.

Only borrowing parts of the Smart style shows how nostalgia works in the process of

creating Y2K fashion: “The content of nostalgia varies, as we shall see, but in one

way or another, all nostalgic content is connected to some right and reassuring thing

in our past. We may say that all nostalgic content makes some form of cultural,

125 Niemeyer, Katharina and Keightley, Emily.

“The commodification of time and memory: Online communities and the dynamics of commercially produced nostalgia. ” : 1641. 126 Niemeyer, Katharina and Keightley, Emily. “The commodification of time and memory: Online communities and the dynamics of commercially produced nostalgia. ” : 1641.