Meet China’s fabulous cross-dressing computer coders
- A group of predominantly male programmers is drawing attention to a Japanese-inspired trend
- Cosplay and lacy dresses are fashion of choice, but are they perpetuating negative stereotypes?
A small and growing community of Chinese programmers is pushing boundaries by coding while cross-dressing and cosplaying as female characters, wearing schoolgirl uniforms and lacy Lolita dresses.
While the Japanese-influenced trend is not new, it has been attracting wider attention with the establishment of an online group called Dress, aimed at “lovely boys” who want to practice their coding skills.
Contributors to Dress, which took off in January on GitHub, the programming collaboration platform owned by Microsoft, are asked to submit a cross-dressing photo of themselves on joining.
The predominantly male group has grown to 134 contributors who have submitted hundreds of photos of themselves wearing feminine clothes or cosplaying. More than 9,200 GitHub users have dropped by the Dress repository to give it a star of approval.
Dress was started by a 19-year-old programmer from Guangzhou, in China’s southern province of Guandong, who prefers to be known as Akechi Satori.
“Boys who pursue cuteness and choose to dress in an adorable style isn’t an outrageous thing … I originally just wanted to put mine and friends’ photos on there,” Satori said in an emailed statement.