Tuku, phonetically “too cool” but literally “tacky cool,” has escaped the damp subculture basement this fall and is currently refusing to leave Chinese feeds.
This aesthetic is a love letter to the “outdated:” retina-searing 1990s Chinese commercial visuals, jelly shoes blooming with plastic flowers hot-glued on like an art project gone rogue, shirts starring every member of the Disney family, drowning in oversized fonts and a fistful of glitter thrown in just for good measure.
Restraint wasn’t invited to the rebellion party. It’s all…
Très, très trashique and très, très intentional.
A #tuku, phonetically “too cool” but literally “tacky cool,” style guide on lifestyle bible app Xiaohongshu (RedNote)
Quiet luxury, the logo-free, beige-on-beige minimalism that has ruled fashion for years, is dead. Chinese Gen Z has decided to ghost it.
As fall arrives, they’re sprinting in the opposite direction. And you can’t miss them.
We’re talking traditional Chinese dresses (qipaos) decorated with neon Eiffeltower and other famous plasticky foreign landmark prints–hello there, glue gun!– hairpins with fake pearls shedding their coating, tote bags loud as a tour guide on a megaphone in Beijing’s Houhai… Aka tuku, “tacky cool.”
Tuku is a declaration of ownership. In a society that not too long ago still thought foreign designs looked far better, while older (1990s) local styles were cheesy, the younger generations realized these styles are actually what made the country stand out.
London College of Fashion student Tiajun Shen told Jing Daily, your go-to website for anything related to the business of luxury in Asia: “The visual styles we grew up with felt quite tacky, like PowerPoint-style fonts and garish, high-contrast color schemes. But as time went by, we realized this is actually a cultural trait unique to us.”
The story here is about the shift from insecurity to self-assurance: Too cool to care.
The term tuku, explained: It was Chinese photographer Li Zhiyuan who coined tuku on popular microblogging platform Sina Weibo in 2016. He told mode-reporting behemoth The Business of Fashion in July 2020: “It is embrace, inclusion, opening yourself up to others, love. It’s not shamate (scroll down for more on that–Ed.), it’s too cool. It’s also not me pretending to be tacky. I’m genuinely tacky, I’m sincerely tacky.” That sincerity has a biography. Li came to Beijing from a smaller city as a teen, dressed so no one would call him tu, then reversed course entirely: “I just wanted to return to that ‘tacky’ Western look from my childhood.”
Tuku is back in business. Image via Rednote user Lou15ht
Nothing states tuku like Tees of yore–i.e., the 1990s slash early 2000s–are allowed to be worn once again. Image via RedNote
New York, New York, 2018
Below follows what we wrote at the time–well, a cleaned-up copy-paste:
Posing like John and Jane Wang on their annual National Day Holiday (which falls on October 1), models and passers-by alike — art imitating life, if you will — melt into that only-in-China tourist blockbuster feel. Tuku: Imitatio et aemulatio at its fashionably finest. As demonstrated by Beijing brand MARRKNULL.
The New York Fashion Week V-Files platform in September 2018 featured Beijing-born MARRKNULL, a brand whose SS19 collection found itself heavily inspired by China’s original tuku culture.
The youth power(ed) brand breaks through the boundaries of tradition and gender and show off China’s new youth culture through the expression of conflicting feelings in clothing. But is it really too cool for school?
MARRKNULL, SS19 collection. The brand’s seasonal lookbook boasted some heavy original tuku inspo, showing off a picturesque series of famous Chinese scenic views.
MARRKNULL, SS19 collection
MARRKNULL, SS19 collection
Tuku is a subcultural form of dressing and photography in China. The trend showcases a more of a sense of humor and sincerity in the face of fashion. Enter MARRKNULL SS19.
The brand’s seasonal lookbook currently boasts some heavy original tuku inspo, showing off a picturesque series of (in)famous Chinese scenic views. The photographic case in point is more direct and literal with models set against the backdrop of Beijing’s finest tourist hotspots, including Tiananmen Square, the Great Wall, Shichahai and so the list rambles on, imitating the look of tourists taking pictures or striking park wedding photography poses in high fashion gear — passers-by welcomed into the frame.
And even in fashion, the flawed truth has become the new fab cool.
That was then, let’s get into the now!
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Fast Forward To 2026
On lifestyle bible app Xiaohongshu (RedNote), one decade since the term was coined, #tuku had racked up 142.2 million impressions as of September 26. On Douyin, the Chinese TikTok equivalent, related videos had collected 34.9 million views.
So what are the tuku trendsetters wearing this fall? Well, Jing Daily mentions the example of HuDieGongZhu (蝴蝶公主| “Butterfly Princess”), a Chinese fashion brand founded in 2020 by designer Liu Min that prints God of Wealth Chinese New Year paintings directly onto qipaos and T-shirts.
Min has a habit of dragging things the global fashion conversation would rather edit out into plain sight. This September, a bag of hers that looks like a bra has been making the rounds online, drawing ridicule, praise and, just our suspicion, a stampede to the checkout page–or at least many people secretly checking the price tag.We suggest you read up on her take on tacky right here, at influencer marketing blog Socialbook.io.
The designer once told The Business of Fashion she gets her inspiration from “fashionable seniors” she sees on the street. Because their dress standards “attract her more than constructed trends.”
Jing Daily, then, went on to list Chinese labels Nφdress, Yvmin and peace888butterfly as tuku bastions. The international kitsch arm, as per the same report: South Korean label Sculptor and British brand Ashley Williams, neither of which has a China flagship.
Hashtagged “tuku,” a 2026 style sample. Image: online, no source available
In the context of street market-inspired, and forever Temper favorite, we have Fabric Qorn. The brand’s T-shirts featuring “办证” (bàn zhèng| “to process documents”) slogans, for instance, are a standout example of the tuku trend. The Chinese term refers to the illegal certificate-forging ads that were plastered across Chinese street corners, telephone poles and public toilets from the 1990s through the 2010s. The ads were always two characters, stenciled in black or red: 办证, followed by a phone number. They offered fake IDs, fake diplomas, fake hukou (the Chinese household registration) papers, fake professional licenses– in other words, anything you needed, for a price.
Laura Darmon, buying director at Chinese multi-brand concept store ENG in Shanghai, whose job is to spot what’s moving and grooving, explained the brands’ momentum to Jing Daily: “One of the main reasons these brands are performing so well is their relentless focus on content creation. Traditional brands typically launch one or two campaigns per year… whereas newer brands maintain a constant stream of social media content.”
This is the commercial logic behind why tuku-adjacent brands move so fast.
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The Social Undercurrent
The tuku revival in 2026 is simultaneously a camouflage strategy and a visibility strategy, which is exactly what makes it interesting. And what separates it from any simple “anti-quiet-luxury” narrative.
The real social undercurrent is a paradox: in an era where being high-profile is socially risky–think youth unemployment with a record 12.7 million higher education graduates entering the job market, or AI eating entry-level positions, China’s Gen Z has chosen to become visible in a way that cannot be “punished.” (We’ll circle back to that.)
Here’s the mechanism. Tuku‘s “tu” does the protective work. It signals: I know this looks tacky. I am doing it on purpose. I am not trying to look expensive, sophisticated or aspirational.
That preemptive self-lowering strips the look of any “uppity” threat. You can’t really be accused of reaching above your station when you’re wearing plastic flower-embezzled sandals, now can ya. You cannot be accused of vanity when the aesthetic is deliberately unpolished. You cannot be accused of competing when your outfit is a meme.
Hello Kitty tuku inspiration on Duitang, a Chinese aesthetic interest online community (think Pinterest) in September 2026
The visibility becomes “safe” because it is coded as ironic, as playful, as “not serious.” It’s a loophole: You get to be seen, but only as someone who doesn’t care about being seen.
This is where the shamate comparison matters.
Shama what now?
In the early 2000s, rural kids feeling marginalized bythe rapid urban development taking place in east China at the time, whereas they had nowhere to go–it’s a wholly different story today, mind you, turned to shamate (think Japanese kei-inspired, colorful shocking-to-the-eye meets 1970s Vivienne Westwood punk looks) to be seen–desperately so. And they were punished for it, i.e., mocked.
In 2026, Gen Z wears tuku to be seen, but with a layer of irony that shields them. The visibility is real; the vulnerability is managed.
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The Shamate Gene, Reexamined
To understand tuku’s undertow, you cannot skip shamate.
In 2006, Luo Fuxing was a rural kid in Meizhou, Guangdong Province in south China, whose parents worked in a city far away–because there were no job opportunitie closer by. He was slash felt left behind. Marginalized. He bought dye at a two-RMB (then 20-USD-cent) shop, turned his hair into a red-purple gradient hedgehog, and posted it to QQ Space (a popular online comunications platform).
He wanted to name his QQ group after the English word for “fashionable,” he searched for “smart,” but couldn’t pronounce it, so he broke it into pinyin syllables: si-ma-te. Later he decided 斯马特 (simate) wasn’t “aggressive” enough, and changed it to 杀马特 (shāmatè, literally “kill, horse, special”).
The original 2006 shamate style inspired by Western 1970s punk and Japanese kei, adopted by disgruntled Chinese youth feeling marginalized and useless. Image: online, source unknown
The irony is sharp: “smart” means clever, stylish. But shamate in Chinese quickly became a slur for “brain-dead, tacky, low-class, rural-urban fringe” aesthetic. A group trying to imitate “fashion” got nailed to the tu label precisely because of the clumsiness of the translation and the extremity of the look.
Within a few years, he was managing 500-plus QQ groups with nearly 200,000 members, who were mostly rural kids and factory workers. Their outrageous punk hairstyles were a desperate bid to be seen. As Luo later explained in interviews discussing shamate with China-based media platforms The World of Chinese (2017) and Sixth Tone (2018), telling both: “Whether praised or mocked, being visible was good.”
Then the mob came. Around 2013, marketing accounts turned shamate into a punchline. Luo dissolved every group.
Today, Luo is 30, living in Dongguan, Guangdong. His most incisive line about the whole thing in a 2019 documentary called We Were Smart (Shamate, Wo Ai Ni), directed by Chinese filmmaker Li Yifan: “We just dyed our hair, wore ripped jeans. Who did we hurt? Why the slurs?”
Shamate 2006 wore it to be seen. Tuku 2026 wears it because it no longer cares who’s watching.
And the distance between those two positions is the story of a generation, the entire emotional arc of young Chinese people over the past two decades.
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A Tale of Two Toos
Tuchunfeng. “Tu” what now? Another one?! Yep. Whereas tuku is loud, a parallel trend called tuchunfeng (土纯风|tǔchún fēng, literally “earthy, pure (innocent) aesthetic”) has become very visible on Chinese socials–having raked 180 million views on Douyin at the time of writing. A September report by Huxiu, one of China’s leading business and technology news platforms, set the tone, stating (loosely translated): “In this era, being high-profile is not a good thing.” Why not?
Huxiu is using the language of “risk” to describe a social condition where visibility itself has gone out of style. The report then explains the mechanism: People keep a low profile in the workplace and in life, and fashion has followed suit.
In an environment of economic uncertainty, standing out can become a liability. You don’t want to be the one who looks like they’re reaching, competing or asking for attention. Being visible means being a target. So you lower your profile.
In an environment of economic uncertainty, more and more people tend to keep a low profile in the workplace and in life, and fashion has followed suit. Enter: tuchunfeng (literally “earthy, pure style”). Image: via #tuchunfeng on RedNote
Standard tuchunfeng gear: pilled plaid shirts, wrinkled white blouses, floral cotton dresses. And a lot of beige. The logic is de-escalation, voluntary invisibility. Not “I dare to wear this” but “I don’t want to be seen.” Tuchunfeng, as opposed to tuku‘s very much undeniable presence, is the trend that hides.
This “pure, innocent” current shares its root with what is referred to as Chinese Dreamcore. The New York Times recently called the latter a “new form of digital painkiller for young people in modern times,” amid a job market that is rather gloomy, endless competition and so on. As one media scholar put it to the newspaper: “They can’t change reality, so they use nostalgia to return to their dreams.”
And there you have it. Two ways to cope with the same mess: fade into the muted palette, or wear the tackiness like armor. Tuku chose the second. And its “tu” in 2026 is no longer just an aesthetic choice.
It is soil, origin, the thing in your blood that cannot be washed out.
When you wear a glitter-crusted shirt that looks like it was kidnapped by a kindergarten arts-and-crafts hour and a pair of fake Crocs you decorated yourself, you wear your parents’ taste, small-town memories, an entire visual inheritance the more refined classes laughed at. But you wear it anyway. And that’s what makes you…
Très, très chic.