Do you ever wear language?

Language is literally “on the move” in the writing on clothing. We’ve all seen it but may not have taken much notice. It deserves attention as an increasingly visible and fashionable type of “banal cosmopolitanism”, which “refers to mundane discourses that enact globalization in everyday life”.

Wearable text was certainly part of everyday life in Wuhan, China, where I lived the last half year. Alphabetic letters on a garment, in particular, jumped out from the wearer’s surrounding linguistic environment, which consisted mainly of Mandarin written in simplified characters, and standing out from the crowd may have been exactly the reason the wearer chose letter-emblazoned clothes. This was articulated by one garment itself, on a breast pocket I saw when I looked up from my noodles over a cafeteria table one lunchtime, which read: “Fascinating//CROSSD CULTURAL HERO//96”

The wearer of this textile text literally becomes more “fascinating” (or distinct, in Bourdieuian terms). Wearing “foreign” language is an archetypal example of the “consumption of spatially distant places, [and] signifiers of cultural diversity, and opening up of lifestyles to new experiential spaces and horizons”, which is how Adam Jaworski (2015, p. 220) describes banal cosmopolitanism.

Wearing language is a personal, but often banal, embodiment of cosmopolitanism and I am interested how distant places and cultures are transformed into graphics, printed onto textiles, bought and worn in China. Of all the scripts and languages I saw on clothing, the alphabetic script, and recognizably (if not always 100% correctly spelled) English words predominate.  Wearing English is vastly more popular than wearing any other foreign language in Wuhan, but also vastly more popular than wearing Mandarin. For months, I took note of what I saw on sale in shops and worn in classrooms, restaurants, buses and trains. When I saw a textile bearing a Chinese or other non-English text, I then kept a rough count of how many items of clothing bearing English I saw until I next came upon a Chinese or other non-English wearable text. Never were the numbers even close: I saw many more English-emblazoned clothes every day.

The types of textile texts I observed can be subdivided for analysis:

1. Brand names (both foreign and Chinese) and trade-marked slogans;
2. Stand-alone messages that are not readily connected to any one brand;
3. Decorative use of writing without forming words

English predominates

In all these categories, English was more popular than any other language, although I saw some Chinese, French, Russian, Latin (Carpe Diem and Veni, Vidi, Vici, so arguably English borrowings from Latin), a little Korean and Dutch, and some non-languages, which I will come back to. As one of my students observed, the language her peers wear is “usually English. It looks more fashionable. But some extremely popular [Chinese] characters will be printed on clothes”.

Even Chinese brand names were often written on clothing in Romanized pinyin script instead of characters. For example, the puzzling ZYGW and PNADA on clothes or the pinyin brand name YUYUANPAI on a suitcase. This practice clearly positions Chinese brands within an international fashion of alphabetic brand names and logos, even if these Chinese brands are targeting the domestic market.

Examples in the second category ranged from short messages like TRENDY, Woosh! or fashion to whole sentences. For example, I saw someone wearing shoes with this long phrase printed on them: “Lets be [obscured] YOUTHFUL [obscured] LEADING THE [obscured] MORE CONFIDEN [obscured]”.

Texts on shoes, especially long texts like the sentence above, are uncommon on shoes in English-dominant places I’ve been to, but a more common sight in China. Similarly, work attire and men’s formal attire would not normally carry text in Australia, but I saw, for example, a middle-aged man wearing a work blazer embroidered with Autumn on a high speed train to Wuhan. The unspoken conventions about wearable text are of course different across cultures, and part of constructing locally-meaningful divisions and prejudices. I argue that in China, the local symbolic power of foreign languages affects the conventions about which clothes are appropriate for bearing text. English, in particular, is desirable enough as a mark of distinction to break into new micro-spaces (like a shoe or a work blazer), whereas foreign languages have less symbolic power and would therefore be less fashionable – maybe even inappropriate – if printed on similar garments in an English-dominant country like Australia.

Examples in the second category (stand-alone messages) abound as the butt of jokes on the internet because of the preponderance of language-like but incorrect or nonsensical phrases. I could add a belt I saw for sale shouting NANAN!!!, an overcoat reading Courtesy to a lady is a gentleman’s and pyjamas emblazoned with Slaap lekkeri (Google tells me this might be slightly off Dutch for “sleep well”).

However, I have long been intrigued rather than amused by these: are clothing manufacturers keen to identify their products with international fashion/culture/language but unwilling to pay for English language work in the design process? Are such language services difficult for designers and manufacturers to access for some reason other than cost? That is, do wearable texts reveal unequal access to linguistic resources, rather than differing aesthetics?

I asked a shop keeper such questions when I saw a top with the lettering “ADD SHE SSR ESSEG” in a relatively expensive women’s clothing store, which had correct English on other garments. I asked the shop assistant what this said, and she responded that it was English. Aware of my disbelief, she starting picking a glued-on letter off and explaining they could all come off. I said the top made no sense in English and she responded that it looked good, though. In a contrasting example, the assistant at a smaller, cheaper shop informed me that she was aware that a nonsense textile text was not English but, even so, it was selling well.

Language play

Do designers and manufacturers simply not care about language quality assurance because they can sell the clothes regardless of language errors or oddities, and at a better price than clothes without any words? Or is “bad English” actually the design goal?

Playing with language can make it even more eye-catching. The brand Yishion is widespread in China and is a good example of such multilingual play: Yi is the pinyin of the Mandarin for clothes, and is combined with the English word fashion.

Whole playful phrases are rarer but include fun examples such as a female student’s overcoat, which read “Words//Boys//Empty words”; in another example, also observed on campus, a female student was wearing a jacket, which announced in French “J’ai perdu//Ma veste” (“I have lost my jacket”).

Adding visual value

Some of these fashion choices may cause you to ask “did the wearer know what the text said, or even that the text was (or was not) English?” That is, what if some wearable texts are worn for aesthetic or price-point reasons, and not “read”? The third category allows us to look at this further, as these are texts without an explicit meaning such as the scattered letters on the coat in the image.

Even so, these texts still have an indexical meaning as symbols of “English”, i.e. international, global culture. That is, these texts highlight the re-purposing of language into visual design resources; it is precisely the stripping back of meaning that makes this archetypal banal cosmopolitanism. To have no lexical meaning to wearers and viewers, and no desire for it, represents the ultimate indicator of language as bearer not of any one ethno-national identity; but of global consumer identity.

In certain markets like China, “foreignized, visual-linguistic forms” (Jaworski 2015, p. 217) are a more saleable commodity than local languages. As the “fascinating crossd cultural hero 96” in the cafeteria explained to me, he did not know the meaning of the text on his jacket but bought it because it looked 《好酷》(“cool”). In other words, the medium is the message, and the message is membership in the global. Or, as one of my students sighed: “sometimes people use the letters just because they worship foreign things”.

And readers, please feel free to tweet us further examples under the hashtag #wear_language (@Lg_on_the_Move).

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