Mahjong, cultural appropriation, and brand collaborations

“Humans are social beings — and I think they’ve just woken up to this,” says Subhas Kim Kandasamy. The Singaporean New Yorker founded Mahjong Palace in 2024, joining a wave of stylish mahjong clubs emerging across major US cities. Mahjong is undergoing a Western revival. Long embedded in Chinese social life, from community halls to family homes, the game is now being discovered by urban crowds. People of all ages are looking for ways to socialize, Kandasamy says. “It’s a backlash against dating apps and digital communities,” he adds. It is, famously, a game best learned in person, and its complexity is part of the appeal. Mahjong Palace has expanded to four cities, drawing what he describes as a “very wide international crowd.” As the West embraces mahjong, brand involvement and non-Chinese-owned clubs are on the rise. What was once a deeply social, community-rooted practice is increasingly being reframed in parts as both a luxury object and a lifestyle signifier — at times flattening its cultural context in the process. Ohmymahjong In 2021, Jing Daily covered a controversy that has since become a reference point in discussions around mahjong’s globalization. The Mahjong Line, a Dallas-based startup, faced backlash after releasing sets that replaced traditional Chinese tile designs with Westernized motifs, alongside messaging that suggested the original game needed a “refresh.” Later, the company apologized, but similar dynamics continue to surface (most recently in the viral New York Times coverage of Dallas-based club Ohmymahjong) pointing to a more uncomfortable pattern. As mahjong gains popularity in the US, there is a growing risk that affluent, predominantly white audiences recast the game as their own, detaching it from its cultural roots and reshaping it into a lifestyle trend without fully engaging with its origins. With luxury houses releasing high-end mahjong sets and social media turns gameplay into content, a parallel ecosystem of clubs and organizers is quietly shaping how the game is learned and shared. The tension between these two forces of commercialization and cultural continuity is becoming harder to ignore. Luxury mahjong sets First released in 2020, Brunello Cucinelli sells a mahjong set for $9,000. Since 2018, Prada has offered a Saffiano leather version which retails for around $4,000. In 2020, Hermès joined the wave, selling a design crafted from Indonesian calfskin and engraved sycamore/maple tiles. Gucci’s first set dates to 2008. Online commentary has questioned those price points, particularly as mahjong has become increasingly prevalent in wealthy American social circles. To their credit, luxury brands have preserved the iconography of each tile — the characters, bamboo suits, and wind symbols remain untouched. Third spaces Social media is reshaping the game, too. On Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote), the hashtag “playing mahjong relieves stress” has accumulated 1.8 billion impressions — a sign of how the game has been adopted by Chinese Gen Z as a form of wellness. In New York, Green Tile Social Club, founded in 2022 by four Asian American friends, has become one of the city’s largest mahjong communities, running weekly Cantonese-style games and Lunar New Year parties that sell out quickly. Across the city, groups including Esther’s Mah Jongg, Riichi Nomi, Fourth Wall, and Bryant Park's open-play sessions draw a broad cross-section of players, with some clubs even selling their own stylish merchandise now too. In London, Four Winds Mahjong Club, Sik Faan Mahjong, and Munk Mahjong Club in Peckham serve a similar function for the East and Southeast Asian community. Beyond their home cities, such clubs have become a valued way for Chinese diaspora communities and students to connect on shared terms. For newer organizers that community-building is intentional. Kandasamy, who comes from the contemporary art world, describes the Mahjong Palace project as rooted as much in culture as in gameplay. “One of our focuses is collaborations with cultural spaces,” he says. Sessions are designed as experiences rather than casual drop-ins — “carefully crafted,” with an emphasis on design and personalized hosting. That framing helps explain the game’s rapid expansion into new social settings. Its appeal, Kandasamy suggests, lies partly in how the format cuts across age groups. “We have always strived to be very age-friendly and inclusive,” he says, positioning mahjong as a rare setting for intergenerational exchange. For diaspora communities who long played the game in living rooms and community halls, mahjong has always been a social lifeline. The Western boom has introduced a pointed question: Who gets to benefit from the trend, and who gets flattened by it. Coach's March 2026 collaboration with Clot, the Hong Kong streetwear brand founded by Edison Chen and Kecing Poon, offers one model for what a more culturally literate partnership can look like. Such partnerships work best when they foreground lived knowledge, rules, etiquette, and social context, rather than abstracting mahjong into a purely visual or luxury object. This approach offers a way to participate in the game’s growing popularity without flattening its cultural origins. What the Western mahjong boom ultimately reflects is something larger: the accelerating integration of Chinese culture into global consumer life, driven as much by diaspora communities and platforms like Xiaohongshu as by any marketing campaign. The brands arrived late, as brands do. The clubs, the communities, and the tiles had been there all along.

Mahjong, cultural appropriation, and brand collaborations

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag

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Mahjong, cultural appropriation, and brand collaborations

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag