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Young Chinese Post on Weibo Return-to-Rural Attire while Visiting Families on Lunar New Year

| Feb 11, 2016 01:06 PM EST

Urban and Rural Attire

For a few days, young urban Chinese, who went home to their provinces to be with their families for the Lunar New Year, temporarily traded their fashionable and sleek clothes for older and more rural attire. The change is keeping in style with the rest of the older generation who prefer more conservative and laidback fashion.

Because of the change, these visitors decided to set a trend in Sina Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, by posting their photos wearing dowdy clothes, reported Foreign Policy.

The portal pointed out that while most of these young Chinese were born from 1990 and were heavily exposed to pop music, fashion magazines and the Internet, most of them still called the place where their parents live in the provinces as “home.” The use of a different set of clothing when in the rural areas is not just to call less attention but has to do also with protecting themselves from the cold as their parents do, wearing “thick cotton trousers in garish patterns.”

The result is designer jeans were set aside and the young Chinese wore for a few days quilted pants as they helped their old folks tend the cabbage fields instead of hang out in coffee shops or Internet cafes.

But the tech-savvy kids also posted their modern clothes, creating a before and after photo collage which they aptly captioned using the hashtag #To go home before the home.

(Photo : Weibo) The tech-savvy kids also posted their modern clothes, creating a before and after photo collage.
The photos elicited comments such as "The home is a place you can be ugly and comfortable” and “When you go back, you have to wear three layers of underclothes and three layers of outerwear.” The rural-urban divide in China is being felt now as the nation celebrates the Spring Festival as the urban visitors return to their roots, do some chores they did as kids and take selfies while doing so.

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