{"id":15069,"date":"2024-12-17T06:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-17T06:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/?p=15069"},"modified":"2024-12-17T15:27:04","modified_gmt":"2024-12-17T15:27:04","slug":"the-role-of-male-idols-in-the-chinas-luxury-industry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/the-role-of-male-idols-in-the-chinas-luxury-industry\/","title":{"rendered":"The role of male idols in China’s luxury industry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

These days, male Idols are a standard part of the advertising toolkit across Asia and in China \u2013 in fashion magazines, shopping channels, adverts, and online sales channels. It may be a rarely seen phenomenon in the West, but rest assured that it is huge in China. Put simply, male idols are able to sell more magazines and more product than female idols \u2013 largely because of their enormous and loyal fan bases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul French caught up with Amanda Sikarskie, one of the authors (along with Peng Liu and Lan Lan) of the new book Male Idols and Branding in Chinese Luxury <\/em>(Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).<\/p>\n\n\n

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Can you briefly explain to us the male idol phenomenon in China \u2013 how is it different to traditional male celebrity icons?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The word \u2018idol\u2019 comes from the Japanese \u2018aidoru,\u2019 which is simply a borrowing of the English word idol to refer to a celebrity or star. We might trace idol culture back to 1960s Japan and Japanese artists like Kyu Sakamato (Kyu-chan) \u2013 gaining popularity in the Western market with hits like \u201cSukiyaki\u201d \u2013 and notice that fans called him Kyu-chan, rather than Kyu-san, likening him to a child. So there\u2019s this decades-old tradition of making idols less masculine, first by rendering them childlike and later through both infantilisation and feminisation. This idol culture really began to take hold in South Korea and China in the 1990s (and a bit earlier in Hong Kong).\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over time, the look of a male idol has become somewhat standardised across East Asia, usually quite thin and about 180 centimetres tall (this is also the height of many Western female fashion models and makes male idols ideally suited for modelling women\u2019s luxury fashion), and with a v-line, rather than square, jaw (which some are born with, but can also be achieved through jawline botox or \u201cK-pop surgery\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n