If China’s love of Western luxury is fading, I think I know why

International luxury brands are feeling the pain and lamenting cutbacks in Chinese consumer spending. Big-picture explanations for why Chinese shoppers have cooled towards brand-name goods include China’s wobbly economic recovery, the troubled housing market and even a crackdown on social media braggarts who showed off their stuff.

That could all be true. But might there be a small possibility that some Chinese people are also simply growing out of their obsession with Western luxury brands, just like how I outgrew my obsession with jeans?

I vividly remember the first time I saw a pair of blue jeans. I was still in secondary school and one girl in my class came to school one day wearing jeans that tightly hugged her hips and thighs, but flared dramatically above her feet. Two proud back pockets with visible stitching called attention to her bottom. Ah, so these were “cowboy trousers”. What a striking, daring look.

Jeans are literally known as “cowboy trousers” in Chinese. I had first heard of “cowboy trousers” during a short-lived political movement a few years earlier: a campaign to “clean up spiritual pollution”, which left me with the idea that denim jeans were an emblem of Western decadence that could somehow corrupt my mind.

That was the beginning of a jeans obsession I didn’t know I had until it passed.