Feminine Ideal Shifts in China’s Cultural Evolution

Her detractors dismiss her as a country bumpkin with rough features only Westerners could appreciate. Her admirers praise her as the essence of ancient Chinese beauty, with a touch of modern spunk.

Meet Lu Yan, a small-town ugly duckling turned 5-foot-10 trailblazer -- and, possibly, the new face of China.

“Some people say I’m changing the way Chinese people see beauty. I don’t know,” Lu, a fashion model now based in Paris, said on one of her Beijing stops. “There are certainly plenty of people who just don’t like how I look.”

Love or hate her, the 21-year-old model’s notoriety coincides with a shift in attitudes toward beauty in a country where her profession has long been viewed as the moral equivalent of prostitution. Beauty contests were so frowned upon that authorities broke up the underground ceremony that selected last year’s entry to the Miss Universe contest.

Today, China’s nascent fashion industry cranks out long-legged beauties by the thousands, and the country can’t seem to get enough of them. Businesses hire them to hawk everything from automobiles to real estate and mobile phones to mineral water. They even represent cities and shopping malls.

Models are so omnipresent in Chinese society that they are considered one of the building blocks of a fast-growing consumer society that is billed as the biggest in the world.

“Models represent a trendy, modern lifestyle,” said Li Xiaobai, head of China’s first and largest modeling agency, New Silk Road. “Every industry wants to use models to improve its image. The demand is so great, we definitely could use a factory to churn out more.”

To show the world how much it now appreciates beauty, China will host the Miss World contest next weekend for the first time. This is seen as a milestone development -- just a year ago, beauty pageants were forbidden by the puritanical standards of both communism and Confucianism.

Last year’s covertly chosen Miss China, Zhuo Ling, had to fly incognito to the Miss Universe competition in Puerto Rico, where she took home, surprisingly, the second runner-up title. This year, with little official explanation, the entire corps of Miss World contestants from 110 countries has been invited to parade around the country for nearly a month of promotional tours and photo ops to boost tourism and local economies.

“The government used to say beauty contests are a bad idea, that it disrespects women. Yet they have to loosen control to show that China is keeping up with the rest of the world,” said Cao Jing, fashion director for the Chinese edition of Harper’s Bazaar magazine in Beijing. “But the Chinese people never stopped loving beauty. The government knows they can’t repress a basic human instinct.”

For a while at least, they did just that. The Communist revolution of 1949 practically transformed the Chinese wardrobe into a sea of unisex Mao suits. Fashion basics from lipstick to high heels slipped into the dustbin of bourgeois decadence.

In 1983, Shanghai, the nation’s pre-revolution fashion capital, kicked off the long march to high fashion when women from a textile factory put on their favorite clothes and staged an amateur show in an abandoned warehouse.

A local garment company noticed and took them to a sales exhibit in Beijing to model its merchandise. It worked wonders; everything the enterprise brought sold out. And the women made headlines -- but didn’t dare call themselves models. That would have been scandalous. Instead, they insisted on being factory workers who would never quit their day jobs.

Their shows created such a stir that Beijing’s senior leaders reportedly summoned them for a private showing. They liked it. With that tacit approval, the first generation of Chinese models was born, along with hundreds of copycats.

By the 1990s, modeling started to establish itself as a career in China. Just as the world was surprised that China produced 7-foot-plus NBA star Yao Ming, few knew that it had become a breeding ground for supermodels scraping the 6-foot mark. Across the People’s Republic, as living standards and diets improve, youngsters are getting taller.

In the past, tall women typically served the nation by becoming basketball or volleyball champions. These days, a batch of modeling schools has sprung up to offer them a more glamorous lifestyle.

“Every year, I see at least 200 candidates from all over the country dying to be models. Their only qualification is height,” said Xiao Bin, a teacher at Beijing Fashion Institute, the alma mater of this year’s Miss China, Guanqi.

Despite the rush to the catwalk, few Chinese models have broken onto the international stage. Lu is one of the exceptions. Although her success is controversial back home, it represents a turning point in setting the standards for a different kind of beauty.

The oldest of three siblings growing up in a small mining town in central China’s Jiangxi province, Lu -- like future models the world over -- was considered an ugly ducking even in that humble backwater.

It’s bad enough that she was born with small eyes, a flat nose and freckles over her high cheekbones -- all negative attributes, according to traditional Chinese views of beauty, which extol large eyes, a small nose and a petite frame. She was also awkwardly tall.

“I hated being tall as a kid,” she said. “No one wanted to walk with me. They saw me as a weirdo.”

So she developed a tomboy, fear-nothing personality as well as terrible posture to hide her height, which helped her land the big break.

“When I was 17, I went to take a class to correct my bad posture,” Lu recalled. “The teacher was putting together a group to go to a modeling competition in Beijing. They were short one person. I didn’t know anything about modeling, and they didn’t like the way I looked. But tall girls are hard to find where I come from. The only reason they picked me was to complete the team.”

They didn’t win. But a Beijing fashion editor found Lu’s look unusual and introduced her to two patrons who would change her life.

“I took one look at her, and I knew she could be a world-class supermodel,” said Li Dongtian, one of China’s first celebrity hairstylists, who runs a chain of studios and a makeup school. “I was so excited. It was 1999, the turn of the century. The media was asking me who should be the new beauty of the next millennium. I would point without a doubt at Lu Yan.”

Lu was stunned. “He was the first Chinese person to ever tell me I was pretty,” she recalled.

According to Li and fashion photographer Feng Hai, who was the first to splash her image across Chinese magazines, Lu’s look and personality make an ideal combination for representing the 21st century Chinese woman. “Before, Chinese people were only interested in big eyes and feminine sweetness. They didn’t know anything about the cool factor and personality,” Li said. “So many Chinese girls are beautiful, but you see her and forget her. With Lu Yan, she is so striking, you take one look at her, and you never forget her.”

That was exactly what happened three years ago when a pair of modeling scouts from Paris passed Lu in the lobby of a Beijing hotel.

“I went to look for girls in China. I saw nobody I liked,” said Nadia Belhachemi, a French agent with the Metropolitan modeling agency who represents Lu. “We were looking for somebody special, with a lot of personality. I was looking for somebody who could be a star. She was perfect.”

Within weeks, the Chinese coal miner’s daughter was walking the streets of Paris, hopping from audition to audition, making the cover of Elle and Paris Match and becoming a favorite mannequin for fashion bigwigs such as Christian Dior, Gucci and Christian Lacroix.

As Lu continues to grace the international stage, she is drawing a following among a new generation of Chinese women.

“By Chinese standards, she is definitely not pretty,” said Gao Xiaofei, 20, a modeling student at the Beijing Fashion Institute. “Just look at our class -- almost everyone has big eyes. But I like her a lot. The more I look at her, the more I think she’s beautiful.”