In China, a lot of clothes shopping takes place online, and one of the leading sites where it happens is Taobao. The Alibaba-owned site is the country’s largest e-commerce marketplace, claiming 636 million active users in 2018.
That volume gives it good insight into what sort of items shoppers are looking for in China, which is set to overtake the US as the world’s largest fashion market this year. In a new report, Taobao laid out the top trends it’s seeing. Among them was a surge in shoppers happy to overlook stereotypical gender ideas about who should wear what.
“According to Taobao transaction data, female consumers prefer more neutral and ‘masculine’ fashion items whereas male consumers are becoming more sophisticated and gravitate toward gender neutral, ‘China cool’ streetwear pieces,” says a translated copy of the report provided to Quartz.