Fashioning the Cosmopolitan Girl: Sartorial Display and Technologies of Femininity in the Chinese Bestseller Du Lala (2007–11)

Abstract

This article focuses on the bestselling Du Lala novel series portraying the career rise and love life of a “foreign corporate white collar woman” in contemporary China. It argues that on top of the books’ popular image as career novels that offer useful tips on office politics and desirable Western business practices for young, educated, upwardly mobile urban women, they also inculcate sartorial and consuming practices as a crucial technology to construct an ideal cosmopolitan femininity predicated on material success, cultural and economic capital, and integration with the world. In Lala's process of “striving for success” (fen dou) and her fashioning of a neoliberal, enterprising, and self-responsible self who is determined to achieve success and status often measured in terms of financial gains and commodity ownership, sartorial display, bodily adornment, and material consumption mediated via Western styles/brands figure crucially. Fashion thus functions as a crucial and contested site where global consumer culture, local tradition, and post-socialist party politics intricately intertwine and vie for ascendance, with consequences reverberating both in the geopolitical dimension of modernization and also in the biopolitical dimension of self-construction.