BEIJING—On an overcast June day, 20 women in white gowns stood in a row on a grassy field. They had spent the morning fussing with one another's hair and makeup, and now, for the big moment, smiled into the camera.
But this was a graduation celebration, not a wedding.
Here in China, college women are spurning caps and gowns and choosing to commemorate their graduations in white tulle, instead.
"Who doesn't like wedding dresses online?" said Liu Xiangping, who was among those posing for graduation shots that day, along with nearly two dozen fellow classmates clad in white. (Their four male classmates wore suits.)
It isn't happening just at Xi'an Polytechnic University in central China, where Ms. Liu graduated this year with a degree in international economics and trade. Across China, graduation season looks a lot like wedding season, with young women flocking to stores to rent wedding gowns.
"The wedding dress makes things feel more meaningful," said Ms. Liu. She and her classmates rented their gowns, which came with full skirts and beaded or pleated bodices, for about $7 a day. Hundreds of other graduates have done the same, taking photos they upload to share with friends online. Some students pose with tiaras or bejeweled diadems, while others choose veils or lacy trains.
Graduation ceremonies here don't typically line up big-name speakers, and parents rarely attend. In the absence of ingrained customs, new, individualized rituals are being grafted onto drier, more perfunctory Chinese graduation festivities.
The graduates
The photo shoot has become one of those rituals, as graduates compete to express themselves playfully. Some have dressed up as pirates, while others have taken graduation photos dressed in Qing dynasty attire, or wearing hard hats and carrying tools. With stiff competition awaiting grads in the job market, Lu Xiaowen, deputy director of the Institute of Sociology at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, says they are enjoying a last burst of freedom and creativity.
The wedding dress "represents that our youth is fading," said Zhang Xuehui, a 24-year-old senior at Northeast Forestry University in the city of Harbin.
Ms. Zhang recently pooled money with five roommates to hire a fellow student to shoot their graduation photos. Together, the six girls posed at various campus spots at the cost of 100 yuan ($16) for three hours, plus gown rental of another 100 yuan each a day. The six of them, Ms. Zhang said, had lived together since their freshman year and wanted to say farewell in a unique way.
"To graduate from university is something full of significance," said Ms. Zhang, who said her group ran into three other bands of students wearing wedding dresses during their on-campus photo shoot.
Though three of her friends had boyfriends, she said, the latter—who didn't participate—had no objections to the shoot.
Others have a more practical view of the wedding dresses: "They make everyone look very beautiful," said Ms. Liu.
The gowns began making the leap beyond weddings years ago, with some girls starting to take pictures in them as a marker of friendship—so-called guimi or best-friend shots, in which close female friends wear identical clothing. Bridesmaid dresses uk stores and photo studios have gotten into the business, particularly to mark birthdays or other special occasions.
Amid China's increasingly creative graduation photos, the wedding-dress-as-graduation-gown theme is so ubiquitous that even some male students have gotten into the act, with several also taking joke shots clad in white with veils.
Other soon-to-be-minted bachelor of arts graduates seeking to dress up sans bachelors have found additional ways to inject novelty into wedding-style shoots, by using such props as fake mustaches or soccer balls. Others have tossed bouquets into the air.
Fan Xinxin, 23, who graduated this year from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, says that for graduates wanting to glam it up and take the more unusual wedding shot, her school has an advantage. "Our school has airplanes," said Ms. Fan, who has struck up a business with classmates renting different outfits to students who want to take graduation photos, including wedding dresses. To date, between 60 and 70 graduating students seeking wedding gowns have availed themselves of such services, she said, including several students who have posed while standing before her school's on-campus airplanes in full wedding regalia.
"The feeling of wearing white is very elegant, like a nymph," said Hu Fan, 22, of Hunan's Central South University of Forestry and Technology, who recently along with nearly two dozen classmates rented identical short white gowns to take graduation pictures. While traditionally in China, white is seen as a color for mourning—one associated with funerals and death—that attitude has rapidly changed, said Ms. Hu, though some old people in her small hometown in central Hunan, she said, still regard the color with prejudice.
"It's just about creating a memory," she said of her peers' fondness for wedding dresses as graduation garb. "After all, we all want to preserve images of our most beautiful selves."
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