When Mao Zedong (毛澤東) stirred China with a call to let a hundred flowers bloom, he surely never imagined anything as frivolous as this.
Across China, people are sporting plastic decorations on their heads in the shape of vegetables, fruit and flowers.
When the trend started a few months ago, it was usually just a humble bean sprout clipped to the hair and erect like a little green flagpole. The slim green shoot seemed to offer a kind of mute protest against the gray, beleaguered environment of the city, but as the fad escalated, especially during the National Day holiday week when Beijing fills with visitors, it has grown to include a riot of plastic vegetation.
Now heads are bristling with clover, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, lavender, cherries and pine trees.
“Some people think it’s cute; some think it’s just plain infantile,” said Wang Yue, a sales assistant who was carefully arranging three flowers and a cherry stem on her friend’s head.
“It doesn’t really make you feel that different,” said the friend with the cherry on top, Xi Caixia. “Maybe a bit childish.”
No one seems to know how the mania started or why. Wearers and hawkers of the herbaceous headwear offered a bewildering range of speculation, or baffled shrugs.
“This shows that in China now we’ll try almost anything that we see on the Internet,” Wang Hao, a college student from northwest China wearing a sprig of clover, said while strolling a Beijing street. “Nobody knows what it means, but we do it anyway.”
Some Chinese newspaper reports have suggested the fad harked back to ancient Chinese teachings about harmony with nature; others have seen echoes of Teletubbies, the late-1990s British television show featuring alien toddlers with wacky antennas.
The trend may have been inspired by the Japanese-style emoticons popular on Chinese Web sites, some say. Many wearers and sellers suspect it started in Chengdu, a city in southwest China known for its laid-back lifestyle.
The trend received mainstream endorsement last month when photographs spread on the Internet of Jay Chou (周杰倫), a Taiwanese singer, and his wife, Hannah Quinlivan (昆凌), wearing bean sprouts.
“Bean sprouts are still our most popular item,” said Zeng Wen, a wholesaler in Yiwu, a market city in eastern China that has thrived from selling things consumers never knew they needed, like glow-in-the-dark hula hoops and Big Mouth Billy Bass, the singing mounted fish.
The most common explanation on the streets was that the floral fascinators just looked cute.
Most of the wearers are in their teens or 20s. The popularity of the decorations reflects a China in which the Internet has lubricated the spread of trends, as well as rumors and ideas, among youth, and has expanded opportunities to profit from fads.
“I think this comes more from Western culture,” said Qiu Chuanhuan, a student at a college in southern China, who was visiting Beijing.
He wore two bean sprouts and a gourd atop his mop of hair, while strolling through South Luogu Lane, a once-hip neighborhood in Beijing.
“Chinese people usually aren’t so comfortable standing out as individuals, but now we’re more open and willing to stand out,” Qiu said.
If head plants speak to individualism, it is a mass-scale variety. Taobao, a popular Chinese retail Web site, lists thousands of sellers engaged in an arms race of increasingly elaborate floral displays. Near tourist sites in Beijing, the competition was ferocious.
Where one hair clip sold for 5 yuan (US$0.80) just a few weeks ago, competition has driven down prices to three or four for the same price, but Li Jinghua, who was selling floral head decorations near the Forbidden City, said the trinkets might still have a world to conquer.
“Does your country have this yet?” she asked. “It will certainly spread abroad.”
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