‘Gross outfits for work’: why Chinese gen-Zers are wearing pyjamas to the office
Name: Gross outfits for work.
Age: This is a trend, so new.
And what does it mean? It means informal, casual, cosy, some might say sloppy clothes. Nightwear even – pyjamas, slippers, that sort of thing.
In the office? That’s taking dressdown Fridays to a whole new level. It’s dress down every days!
Where? China. And Chinese social media. On Douyin (Chinese TikTok), “Kendou S” posted a video showing off her work outfit: slippers, PJ bottoms and a brown sweater dress, set off with a pair of holey woollen gloves.
I’m watching it now – there’s also a balaclava! Yeah, she probably doesn’t want to get the sack. She says her boss told her the clothes she wears to work are “gross” and that she needs to smarten up “to mind the image of the company”.
Don’t tell me, it’s gone viral? Yup – 736,000 likes and 1.4m shares. The hashtag “gross outfits for work” spread across Weibo (China’s version of X), Xiaohongshu (similar to Instagram) and other platforms. Thousands of young workers are defying tradition by showing that, for them, work attire now means sweatpants, hoodies and, yes, sleepwear.
It’s a revolution! In its own small way, sure.
And is it in any way related to the socioeconomic situation in the country as a whole? Good question. You know about the “lying flat” movement of course …
AKA “Tangping” (as previously featured in pass notes), which eschews an ambitious work ethic in favour of a simpler, easy-going life? Yes, that. As growth slows, opportunities are fewer, and young people are beginning to take things a bit easier, even those with jobs.
Could it also have something to do with the pandemic? Well that has certainly been happening elsewhere. A recent report in the US found that people are dressing more comfortably and more individually when at work.
Hardly surprising, after all the remote and hybrid working. Exactly – the line between home and work has become a little blurred.
Pyjamas though, is that not stepping over the line? Well, a survey in November found a third of British employees admitted to wearing PJs when working from home. And we’ve always done the school run without getting dressed, even if the schools might not be so keen. Surely the office is the next logical step …
Do say: “I’ve got a meeting today, I’ll wear my best silk PJs.”
Don’t say: “Oh, it’s on Zoom? Just the top then …”
documentary and hints these encounters will remain with him a long time: “We killed a lot of people. [But] it was all negative because we lost our brothers in arms. It was very, how can I put it, very nerve-shredding. My head was full of everything and I needed to unload it.”
An obvious conclusion to draw is that fighting in the remote landscape is pointless. But despite the casualties they are taking, the Ukrainians filmed talk of the necessity of holding back the Russians, their hopes for a democratic future, and in the words of a combat medic, Natalia, the only woman filmed, of finding a home after the war to renovate and to “adopt more dogs, lots of dogs”.
The documentary makes clear that the Russian invaders are taking far greater numbers of casualties in the battle for the forest, “between three and 10 to one”, Roberts estimated. Often they are poorly trained, unwisely massing in large groups, but while a couple are shown captured, very few surrender.
Even so, for the Ukrainian defenders there is very little respite, and their supplies of weaponry are increasingly short, in a conflict that appears without end. This is not a film that could or would have been made in the first 18 months of the war, Roberts says. Having spent seven weeks working daily a few miles from the frontline, he now believes President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s
recent statement that 31,000 Ukrainians had been killed in the war is almost certainly an underestimate.
• Ukraine, Enemy in the Woods is available to watch on iPlayer and will be broadcast on BBC Two at 9pm on Monday 25 March
had abandoned his people, and that I’d lived my whole life in anticipation of the moment we would be reunited.”
He worried intensely that she wouldn’t want him back. “But when I first saw her, she looked into my eyes and saw that I was her son and I told her that I had missed her so desperately and if it hadn’t been for her I could not have made it. And I thanked her for her love and told her that I’d thought about her every day. And when we first embraced, it was like I was a little boy in her arms again.”
Salazar-Hobson’s mother told him that, after he’d been kidnapped, the search to find him had consumed her life. He found out that the police had done nothing to help the family – the Hobsons were never prosecuted. “She understood, of course, that this was because we were poor Latinos and therefore I was disposable. They wouldn’t move a muscle to track down a white couple.” He also learned how his father, who died 20 years after his kidnapping, blamed his siblings for him being taken: his brother, who was only nine, was sent away to a Catholic boarding school and his sister to a convent, where they remained for the rest of their childhoods.
Salazar-Hobson spent the next years rebuilding his relationship with his mother and his siblings. “You know, regaining that family in adulthood, we’re not perfect but we’re an immensely loving family and to have that in my life has been the biggest blessing I’ve received.”
He has manifested Chavez’s dream and become one of the US’s most successful and prolific federal labour rights attorneys. He has taken on multibillion-dollar corporations, represented First Nation people and LGBTQ+ farm worker communities, and won every case. “I’m used to people underestimating me, this poor Chicano boy going up against rooms full of corporate lawyers in suits, but I always prevail,” he says.
The past few years have been brutal for the family. His mother died, made ill by the pesticides she had been exposed to for so many years, and Salazar-Hobson lost four of his siblings to Covid. “I have spent my life fighting oppression and injustice but what happened to my family and my community during Covid was that they were discarded, they were disposable and they were wilfully neglected,” he says. “Hundreds died. And seeing this has made me even more militant in my quest for justice.”
He now plans to dedicate the rest of his life to the anti-trafficking movement. “It is my hope that somehow my story can be of service to the community of survivors of sexual assault and trafficking; what happened to me can show other kids that they don’t have to be ashamed, that they can rise up to become whoever they want to be. I want to show them that I refused to be broken and, in the end, I did what I always vowed to do: I made it home.”
• Antonio, We Know You: A Memoir is out now.