Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – When talking about dressing style for going to the office, the first thing that comes to mind is definitely “neat” and “clean”. However, these two words for dressing for the office do not apply to the current trends in China.

Launching from CNN Internationaldressing sloppy and “clubby”, such as wearing the ugliest pajama pants, the hairiest sandals, and messy clothes has become a new trend for going to the office in China.

Over the past few months, social media users in China have been united in uploading photos of “ugly” clothes to their offices with the hashtags #grossoutfitforwork #uglyclothesshouldbeforwork #ootd and creating competition over who wears the worst clothes.

On Weibo social media, the hashtag #grossoutfitforwork has attracted more than 140 million views and tens of thousands of discussions. At the end of February, a Douyin (Chinese version of TikTok) user admitted that he was scolded by his boss for dressing in classy clothes for the office.

After the upload went viral, other employees in China started competing to wear similar clothing styles.

It turned out that this action was also a form of protest against the bad attitude of superiors, poor working conditions, low wages and too long working hours.

“Making a very small salary, terrible coworkers, what more could you expect from my outfit?” said one netizen, quoted on Tuesday (23/4/2024).

Seeing the increasingly viral trend, Chinese government-run media, People's Daily stated that the phenomenon of dressing ugly for the office was a kind of self-deprecation.

“As long as employees dress politely, have the correct work attitude, do not influence other people, and do not involve matters of principle, there are no problems,” he wrote People's Daily.

The strange employment-related trend is not the first time in China. Previously, young people in China had hoped to be fired by companies so they could be free from stressful jobs and live more relaxed lives because they adopted the “tang ping” lifestyle.

The term “tang ping” describes the younger generation who only want to make the minimum effort possible to survive.

Now, wearing dirty and dirty clothes has become a new endeavor for Generation Z who are disappointed with the country's gloomy economic prospects and record high youth unemployment rates.

“They think like 'why bother when your future work and life prospects are not so bright',” said Boh Project founder Bohan Qiu regarding the phenomenon of dressing loosely for the office.

“Previously they saw work as pursuing a dream and companies motivating everyone to fight for the (economic) cake. However, now people think that's a lie,” he continued.

Although the examples going viral on social media are more extreme, Qiu believes that casual wear for work will always be popular in China and will continue to be, especially in workplaces with long hours and long hours in front of computers. Usually, this will happen to the younger generation who are used to working remotely during the pandemic.

Qiu added that although his employees weren't dressed like the people in the viral video, they tended to dress “low-key,” such as wearing sweatpants, shorts, sandals and the like. That's acceptable “as long as it looks cool.”

For information, in January 2024 the Chinese government reported that the unemployment rate in December 2023 reached 14.9 percent among the 16 to 4 year age group. This figure does not include the 62 million full-time students.

Previously, the highest figure occurred in June 2023, reaching 21.3 percent.

[Gambas:Video CNBC]

(rns/rns)