Body-shaming concern: fad of women posing in children’s clothing

The children’s clothing section at Uniqlo in China has gained an unexpected new clientele: adult women.

In the latest viral challenge to sweep Chinese social media, women pose for dressing-room selfies in children’s T-shirts from the Japanese fashion giant. The trend has ignited heated a debate about whether it promotes body shaming, with experts raising concerns that it reinforces the country’s unhealthy standards of beauty.

“This is a dangerous trend, not just in terms of a drive for thinness and the pressure this puts on women and girls, but also in terms of the overt sexualization of women,” said Tina Rochelle, an associate professor in social and behavioral sciences at the City University of Hong Kong who researches the influence of gender and culture on health. She said that the small clothes are likely to be tighter and more form-fitting on a woman’s body.

On Weibo, a microblogging platform, where the hashtag “Adult tries on Uniqlo children’s clothing” has been viewed 680 million times, criticism is split between those who object to the unrealistic beauty standards the challenge promotes and those who express the more practical concern that women are stretching out the clothes and rendering them unsaleable.

One user called it “another way of showing off the ‘white, young, thin’ aesthetic,” referring to a phrase commonly used to describe the country’s dominant beauty standard. The person added: “It emphasizes unhealthy body shaming and should be firmly resisted.”

Uniqlo did not respond to emails Thursday seeking comment.

The challenge has been labeled the latest iteration of “BM style,” a type of fashion recently popularized by the cult Italian brand Brandy Melville, which is youthful, casual and, above all, thin. Its stores carry only one size: extra small.

Since the brand opened its first Chinese store in Shanghai in 2019, it has become an aspirational symbol for young women desperate to squeeze into its clothes. An unofficial sizing chart circulated on Weibo showed how much women at various heights would need to weigh to fit — a 5-foot-3 woman would need to weigh 95 pounds.