At Beijing’s Forbidden City, a designer and his friends were asked to “return in ordinary attire”. Guess who?

They showed up at the Forbidden City (紫禁城, zijincheng) in Beijing to outdo the tourist site they went to see. But the old palace was no place for fashion iconoclasts. The staffers persuaded them to return after they changed into more acceptable attire. American designer Rick Owen and three others with him were told to “换普通的服装再来 or come back after changing into ordinary clothes”, according to local news reports. Mr Owens was in the former imperial grounds with his wife Michele Lamy and their friends/collaborators, the Montreal-based designers behind Matières Fécales (Fecal Matter), Hannah Rose Dalton and her partner Steven Raj Bhaskaran. The Canadians shared on Matières Fécales’s Instagram page, and described what happened.

“This moment when we got kicked out of forbidden city was really intense for us. They asked us to remove our makeup and change to normal clothes and then we could get in.” It is hard to blame the Forbidden City personnel for not knowing that, for the quartet, they were dressed normally. They would not have anything else confirming to the standard to change into. It is amazing the deliberate provocateurs didn’t consider that their “normal” is, for others, horrific, even eerie. The four said that they refused the request “because it’s more than a look for us, it’s our identity.” The conclusion for them was that “what we take away from the experience is more determination to keep doing what we do to fight for more acceptance and tolerance for difference around the world.” The post has since been deleted from the Matières Fécales page.

It is hard to blame the Forbidden City personnel for not knowing that, for the quartet, they were dressed normally. They would not have anything else confirming to the standard to change into

For many Chinese on 微博 (weibo) when the news broke, the group “提早过万圣节” or celebrated Halloween early. Surprisingly, just as many felt that the guests were free to dress as they pleased. One of our Beijing contacts, however, thought that visitors to a historically important site, such as the Forbidden City, “人就得像人”, a person should look like a person. Interestingly, reactions in the West have been less accommodating. On social media, some are saying the visitors were “deliberately provocative”. Some even berated them: “when visiting a foreign country, respect the local customs”. One SOTD reader asked: “It is okay for women in the West to bare their breasts in public. Should they do that in Asia and when told to cover up or arrested, cry foul?”

Rick Owens was reportedly in Beijing to participate in an exhibition of his eponymous furniture. The incident at the Forbidden Palace took place when the quartet was exploring the city. Videos circulating on Chinese social media showed the two couples walking among other visitors to the tourist attraction, some of them probably weird to the four of them or in costume as they were wearing Qing-period dress. It is possible that the less-exposed Forbidden City personnel took Ms Dalton, who is bald and usually paints herself white, to be weird, and wanted her to look like the rest of the 老外 (laowai) or foreigners. Beijing may have become a modern capital, but in the time-stands-still Forbidden City, some visitors might still be considered—and regrettably—by the pejorative 洋鬼子 or western devil.

Updated: 19 October 2024, 08:00

Photo: matieresdecales/Instagram