On a humid August afternoon in China’s southern metropolis of Shenzhen, Ken runs his fingers along a rack of asymmetrical, rough-hewn linen jackets at Z Boutique. In this enclave of avant-garde taste, he looks every bit the curator.

But he didn’t always work in fashion, and the curation is learned. Just a few years ago, Ken was delivering construction materials, dreaming of immersing himself in creativity. He pivoted to fashion to escape the mundane, viewing the shop floor as a ticket to a life of beauty and a glamorous future.

What Ken — and many others sharing this dream — could not have known, however, is that this ticket to a better life rarely gets validated.

Over the course of an 18-month study across four of China’s largest cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, capital of the southern Guangdong province — my research team and I explored the unique place boutique fashion workers hold in China’s fast-changing labor landscape as part-creative professionals, part-service employees. Since the late 2000s, these small fashion boutiques, often run by former buyers, young designers, and entrepreneurs, have been catering to style-literate shoppers who value an “insider” status over mass-market trends with images of highly curated taste. Limited-run collections from independent designers, rare import labels, and select vintage pieces that emphasize craftsmanship, unique fabrics, and cuts all help to signal this much-coveted taste.

However, to create this highly curated experience, boutique fashion workers must often balance creative ambition with the harsh demands of the digital retail economy. As our research revealed, deep desires for creative belonging often masked starker truths of trapped ambition. Employees are encouraged to accept exhausting and precarious conditions as the inevitable price of aesthetic success, as they invest endlessly in visibility and belonging for rewards that rarely translate into upward mobility.

For most, building and maintaining a high-income and elite customer network is part of the job, and those who work outside of affluent enclaves fight an uphill battle to attract customers who might otherwise turn to major chains or fast fashion. Mia, who manages a boutique shop in Beijing’s bustling Sanlitun district, underscored the importance of location. “In smaller cities, or even some parts of Guangzhou, you have to fight for sales with big brand names,” she told us. “(There), clients’ tastes can be more conservative.”

Boutique employees are also expected to create an intimate shopping experience catered to their customers, complete with personalized styling advice, narratives and philosophies about each garment and each label, and a store designed to feel like a private wardrobe rather than a typical retail outlet. Many, including Mia, post curated shots of garments daily on Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, as they respond to customers’ never-ending messages. Each post is carefully lit, with captions containing subtle nods to fabric quality and niche designer names. Often, boutique workers post five or more times a week, though many devote an additional 10 unpaid hours to building online personas and relationships.

In the meantime, they must also curate their own image. As one of our interviewees, Bonnie, put it: “We are the advertisement … Our emotional labor is what keeps the brand alive.”

Some employees are so aware of their self-brand that they refuse to work with lower-end wholesale brands for fear of losing customers buying into the “niche class” identity. “They (lower-end brands) break the illusion,” boutique employee Adam says. Instead, boutiques often work to evoke an image of exclusivity and cultural literacy, that they are for shoppers who value understated luxury, craftsmanship, and design originality, and who signal their belonging through subtle style codes rather than conspicuous logos. Maintaining that aura means strictly curating product lines to fit this taste.

These tireless efforts and constant customer connections — even once the sale is complete — pay off. Many customers end up becoming more loyal to the shop employees than the shop itself. However, many of the employees we talked to admitted that they felt hampered by a ceiling they could not break through, in spite of all their hard work.

Bonnie is a good example of how these invisible barriers impact a boutique’s success. She thrives on cultivating elite clients and Instagram followers. Yet her rise relies on advantages and prerequisites for success in self-branding that many lack — an overseas education, fluency in Japanese, and family financial support. By contrast, her colleague Kane hustles just as hard, but it hasn’t led to upward mobility. Adam is faced with a similar situation. Although his skill in styling and eye for rare cuts put him on fast-track insider lists, he was embarrassed when his company still favored foreign-based employees for buyer roles that had been his longtime dream.

These stories and struggles do not exist in a vacuum. In labor process research, scholars have shown that aspiration can be a kind of labor discipline, and personal ambition and creative belonging often encourage workers to accept — and even embrace — precarious conditions. China’s creative industries position short-term sacrifice as an investment in future status. Yet as more believe that each unpaid hour spent curating, networking, or “living the brand” will someday pay off, more consent to conditions that are neither secure nor equitable.

Boutique employees aren’t just selling clothes. They’re selling themselves — their style, cultural fluency, and curated lives — in the hopes of receiving powerful symbolic rewards. All the while, they must navigate digital platforms like messaging app WeChat, Rednote, and Instagram that sharpen the trap by making visibility a currency. Those who can’t convert visibility into career steps — or who were unable to begin with connections or inherited wealth — remain locked in the grind, constantly refining self-presentation for an audience that offers approval, but not opportunity.

The same logic of exposure, network access, or “doing it for the passion” replacing pay also runs through tech startups, media internships, and the arts. It is as if work in creative sectors gets narratively framed as a lifestyle or personal journey, rather than a job, which makes it easier for both organizations and workers to normalize symbolic rewards in place of material ones. However, by reframing underpaid work as self-investment, creative economies turn ambition into consent.

For Ken, Mia, Adam, Bonnie, and Kane, the boutique is more than a job. It’s a social stage, a personal brand builder, and an aesthetic home. It’s also a gilded loop: chasing style with all the artistry they can muster, while living the grind the industry’s glamor works so hard to hide.

Back in Shenzhen, Ken wraps a jacket for a client who has been coming to his store for years. His phone buzzes again. It’s a direct message on Rednote from someone asking if more sizes will arrive in the indigo shirt he posted last week. He replies with warmth that feels personal, but also trained — boutique emotional labor at its finest.

All names are pseudonyms to protect the participants’ anonymity.

With contributions from Su Jin, a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.

(Header image: E+/VCG)