China’s ‘punk wellness’ wave is luxury’s opening

At a bar in Shanghai, they ask for your wrist before your order. A resident Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner reads your pulse, then recommends a drink to match: goji berries to nourish the liver, red dates to replenish qi, longan to calm the mind. The bar — founded in 2025 by students from Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine as Niang Qing (酿青), and rebranded Zhihe (芷鹤) this year after a trademark dispute — has already grown to five locations nationwide. The logic, rooted in 2,000 years of TCM, is entirely modern: you’ve been staying up until 2am again, and something has to give. This is the consumer behavior now filed under “punk wellness,” and it is reshaping what young Chinese professionals spend money on, and why. The term traces to a now-iconic 2017 image: the drummer of Chinese rock band Black Panther caught cradling a thermos — one netizens gleefully insisted was steeped with goji berries. The contrast between rebellion and recuperation, excess and repair, went viral, and stuck. Young people began claiming the concept as their own, articulating a lifestyle of simultaneous self-destruction and self-rescue: beer with goji berries, cola steeped with codonopsis root, all-nighters followed by sheet masks. The humor was self-deprecating. The spending was real. A 2025 study in the Chinese journal Statistics and Application found that while 68.57% of Gen Z respondents had little formal understanding of TCM, 96.9% had practiced some form of it, and 56.07% displayed the defining punk wellness behavior of indulging while maintaining health. Beneath the irony is genuine anxiety: per one 2024 survey cited by AFP, more than 60% of young Chinese consider themselves to be in a suboptimal state of health. Why LVMH and L Catterton are investing in Traditional Chinese Medicine Luxury noticed early. LVMH launched Cha Ling, a TCM-inspired skincare brand developed in Guerlain’s labs, back in 2016 with a strategic focus on the Chinese market — though founder Laurent Boillot, the former Guerlain CEO, has since taken sole ownership of the brand. Then, in January 2024, L Catterton, the consumer-focused investment firm founded in partnership with LVMH and Groupe Arnault, led a $5 million Series A round in WTHN, a New York-based modern TCM wellness brand offering acupuncture, cupping and herbal products in distinctly luxury environments. The bet signals something beyond category diversification. TCM, stripped of its clinical associations and repositioned inside the language of premium self-care, has the potential to become a mainstream luxury vertical. Market data supports the ambition. Business Research Insights estimates the global TCM market at more than $280 billion, projecting it to climb past $510 billion by 2035 — though estimates vary widely between research houses depending on how the category is defined. The more telling figure may be domestic: Tianxia Gongchang Research puts China’s 2024 TCM industrial output above RMB 900 billion ($126 billion), a sector it expects to reach the trillion-RMB mark this year. Gen Z turns traditional Chinese medicine from obligation into aspiration Yet what makes this moment distinct is not scale but a value shift. TCM was long coded as something your grandparents did, a category bound up with age and obligation. Consultancy Zhimeng traces Gen Z’s wellness evolution from punk irony through “precision health” to something closer to joyful self-cultivation, with 62.6% of young consumers it surveyed in 2025 saying they pay more attention to their health than before. The shift reads less like a passing fashion than a reorientation of aspiration. Gen Z makes up roughly 17% of China’s population and, per brokerage Western Securities, could account for 40% of its consumer spending power. From goji lattes to meridian spas: Where luxury goes next For luxury brands, the question is not whether to enter this space but how. Zhihe’s model — personalization through consultation, ritual through service, pleasure without guilt — suggests one blueprint. Opportunities go well beyond cocktails: spa experiences built around meridian theory, skincare hierarchies derived from herbal medicine, hospitality concepts that treat TCM botanicals with the connoisseurship once reserved for fine wine. Tong Ren Tang, China’s 350-year-old TCM institution, has moved in this direction already: its youth-focused sub-brand Zhima Health runs herbal coffee shops in Beijing malls, where under-35s now make up more than 80% of visitors and the goji-berry latte is the signature order. What LVMH understood with Cha Ling, and what L Catterton’s WTHN bet confirmed, is that TCM’s luxury potential lies not in medicalization but in mystique. The same cultural logic that turned natural wine from niche pursuit to status symbol, or elevated Japanese omotenashi into a global hospitality benchmark, can operate here: an ancient system, legible to insiders, personalized to the body, embedded in narrative. That combination is not far from what luxury has always sold.

China’s ‘punk wellness’ wave is luxury’s opening

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag

Upgrade to Pro

Sectors

Insights

Company

China’s ‘punk wellness’ wave is luxury’s opening

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag