Young Chinese refuse to try. He defiantly wears pajamas instead of suits to work

When it got cold in December, Cindy Lu started wearing fuzzy pajamas over a hoodie to the office. Wearing pajamas to work soon became a habit for her, and soon she didn’t even bother wearing the same top and bottom, and just wore whatever was most comfortable for her.

A few months later, she shared her photo on the Xiaohongshu network, the Chinese equivalent of Instagram, where tens of thousands of young employees were already posting similar pictures labeled “disgusting outfits at work.” “I just want to wear whatever I want. I don’t think it’s worth spending money on work clothes when I’m just sitting there,” explained Lu, 30, who works as an interior designer in Wuhan.

The reluctance to live up to expectations about appropriate appearance at work reflects a growing reluctance among young Chinese to pursue a life of ambition and effort that was typical in previous years, according to the US daily. Against the backdrop of slowing economic growth and fewer promising opportunities, young people are gravitating towards a trend called “laying back”, which seeks a comfortable lifestyle without unnecessary complications.

Wearing the most casual clothes to the office has become a trend on Chinese social media when a user with the nickname Kenda S- posted a video on the Tou-jin (Douyin) platform, similar to TikTok, in which she showed what she wears to work.

She was wearing a furry brown knee-length sweater, plaid pajama pants, a pink quilted jacket, and shaggy brown ankle boots. In the video, its author confided that her superior reprimanded her several times for her outfit and called her appearance disgusting. The video received over 735,000 likes and over a million users shared it.

The label “disgusting outfits at work” then spread on several Chinese social networks, whose users began to compete over whose clothes at work are more repulsive. On Weibo, the related content has been viewed by hundreds of millions of people and there have been discussions about why young people don’t want to dress up for work these days.