Inside China’s era of aesthetic acceleration

It had been one year, two months, and 13 days since my last visit to Shanghai. So when the opportunity came up for an assignment in the city once proudly branded as the “Oriental Pearl,” I booked the first ticket available, with a very specific expectation in mind. I thought I was going to see a market that had finally, quietly, moved on. Moved on from the West as the default reference point, from the need for external validation, from this lingering habit of looking outward before looking inward. In the post-Covid years, there has been no shortage of conversation around internally driven consumption — around China becoming more self-sufficient not just economically, but culturally. I thought I was going to see a China that had begun to define taste on its own terms. In some ways, it has. Shanghai today remains one of the most stimulating cities in the world to consume in. The density of experiences — from dining to retail to nightlife — is not just impressive, it is almost excessive in the best possible way. If sophistication were measured purely by availability and execution, Shanghai would have very little left to prove. And yet, the longer I stayed, the more I found myself sitting with a slightly uncomfortable realization. Not that something was missing, but that something was not quite landing. A thousand flowers, grown from the same seed As a consultant working in the fashion and luxury space, window shopping has become something of a professional habit. Walking into any local boutique on Julu Road, almost immediately, you can tell that these spaces have been meticulously thought through. The lighting is carefully calibrated, the materials are considered, the spatial composition feels intentional. But then you stay a little longer. The service begins to feel inconsistent. Store staff seem less enthusiastic than the space would suggest. The product does not always hold up under closer inspection. At one point, a sales associate told me that a silk scarf from a local brand was “the Hermès of China” — a comparison that felt more aspirational than convincing. In another store owned by one of China’s most promising handbag brands, a drawer filled with bags priced in the upper thousands of RMB was casually pulled open, revealing pieces unceremoniously stacked on top of each other like a teenage boy's sock drawer. In those moments, you begin to catch a glimpse behind the illusion. Walking down a single street, what initially appears to be a flourishing ecosystem of independent concepts — shops, cafés, showrooms, each presented as distinct, curated, and expressive — starts to feel increasingly familiar. The references begin to converge. You start to recognize the same visual language being translated again and again: a touch of Tokyo minimalism, a hint of Copenhagen restraint, a layer of Seoul’s polished casualness. The combinations vary, but the underlying logic remains strikingly consistent. What presents itself as diversity is, in essence, variation within a shared template. The same dynamic extends into personal style. There is no shortage of well-dressed individuals in Shanghai. People clearly care, and they are just as visually literate as their counterparts in any major global city. But what is often missing is a sense of authorship. You understand what someone is referencing almost immediately, but much less frequently do you understand who they are. Those two things are not the same. Entering taste rather than living it On the last night of my two and a half weeks in Shanghai, a friend who works for a major Italian fashion house took me to one of the chicest cocktail bars in town, tucked away on Nanchang Road. After waiting nearly three hours to get in — a very Shanghai kind of commitment — I found myself observing the scene from outside. From the street, everything was working exactly as it should. The lighting, the music, the density of the crowd. But when I finally got close enough to look inside, what struck me was not the design, but the behavior. The room was full, but a noticeable number of people were on their phones — not casually checking, but fully absorbed, scrolling through other content while sitting inside a space they had waited hours to enter. They had arrived, dressed for the occasion, participated in the process, taken their place within the setting. And yet, in a subtle but undeniable way, they were not fully there. Taste, in this context, is not always something that is lived or inhabited. Increasingly, it is something that is entered, performed, and at times slightly detached from the experience it is meant to represent. From imitation to simulation As a member of the Chinese diaspora who has spent decades living in the West, the dominant narrative I have encountered has always been that China imitates the West — particularly when it comes to fashion, design, and taste-making. I remember growing up in Hefei in the 1990s, my parents deliberately designing our home interior to feel more European. But standing in Shanghai today, that framing feels increasingly insufficient. What is happening is no longer simple imitation, but something more advanced and more complex. China has moved into a phase of simulation. It is no longer just forms that are being reproduced, but the appearance of values: effortlessness, restraint, a kind of intellectualized minimalism that signals taste without seeming to try too hard. A quick scroll through Xiaohongshu will show millions of posts teaching you how to dress “old money” — an aesthetic that projects inherited aristocratic ease that most people have only encountered through media, not lived experience. The difficulty is that values, unlike form, cannot simply be extracted and replicated. They come from somewhere: from history, from context, from lived experience. When the visual language of a value is reproduced without the conditions that gave rise to it, the result is something that looks convincing but feels, in ways subtle and not so subtle, unanchored. Highly educated eyes, still developing judgment China today does not suffer from a lack of exposure to aesthetics. If anything, it may be one of the most visually saturated environments in the world. But exposure is not the same as education. What is still in formation is a more widely shared system of aesthetic judgment — one that builds internal standards rather than relying on external validation. At present, many consumers are highly fluent in identifying what looks right. Far fewer are equally confident in articulating why, or in determining whether it holds outside of a specific context. Instead, taste is being shaped by systems optimized for efficiency: platforms, algorithms, and content ecosystems that reward visibility and speed. These systems are extraordinarily effective at producing aesthetic consensus, but far less concerned with cultivating aesthetic conviction. Where meaning begins to anchor There are spaces, however, where this dynamic begins to shift. One such example is marathon running, and increasingly, Hyrox. In these emerging subcultures — particularly those tied to physical practice — taste seems to evolve differently. Communities built around endurance and discipline are beginning to form their own internal logic. Aesthetically, many of the brands in this space still draw heavily from established references; Satisfy, District Vision, and others are clearly present in the visual language. But the difference lies beneath the surface. The values associated with these spaces — discipline, consistency, self-regulation — are not abstract. They are experienced directly, through the body, through routine, through effort. You cannot fake your way through a marathon, and that creates a fundamentally different relationship between form and meaning. These ecosystems begin to anchor more quickly as a result, even if their visual language is still evolving. A system in transition What Shanghai revealed on this trip is not a lack of taste, but a system in transition — one that has become extraordinarily effective at producing aesthetics, that has developed a high degree of visual literacy, and that is now beginning to confront a more complex challenge: how to build meaning that can sustain, rather than simply support, what is seen. The businesses that will succeed are not simply the ones that produce better images or more refined aesthetics. They are the ones able to create the conditions in which values can actually take root and grow. Because values cannot be imposed, and they cannot be imitated indefinitely. They have to be lived into existence. This is an opinion piece and does not necessarily reflect the views of the publication. Richard Bao is a Milan-based brand strategist specializing in luxury, digital strategy, and connecting Western brands with Chinese consumers.

Inside China’s era of aesthetic acceleration

China’s luxury interlude that never really was

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Inside China’s era of aesthetic acceleration

China’s luxury interlude that never really was