Linkin Park T-shirts are a fashion phenomenon in China. And no one has a convincing explanation

"Why Does Everyone Wear Linkin Park T-Shirts" is the title of one of the dozens of threads started on Reddit between 2014 and today. They are all queries made by Westerners in China. Their surprise comes from the group's very high popularity among the public, especially among young people. It doesn't matter if it's in the provinces or in big capitals, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Chinese have a Linkin Park T-shirt, something that hasn't happened in the West since pre-crisis times.

Give me a Kink, give me a Park: the funny thing is that this huge Asian community doesn't even wear a wide variety of number crunching merchandising. The popularized garment refers to one of the t-shirts from the promotional tour of the album Minutes to Midnight, the third in their career, which is also the third most popular after the first two albums... but at a huge distance from their own fans of Meteora or Hybrid Theory. It's an odd choice.

There's more: many of the popularized pieces of clothing are misspelled. Some of them say "Minutes Tomicnxyt". In many others the band is misspelled, calling itself for example "Kinkin Park" ("kink" in English means "sexual affiliation").

What does the field study say about this strange 2020 trend? The redditers who have been encouraged to ask the locals have received varied answers. Some "love" Linkin Park, especially after a tour they did in 2007, promoting the album of marras. Whatever the case, Nu Metal hit hard at the time, as did "Avril Lavigne, Limp Bizkit, Celine Dion and Korn" (another phenomenon in itself is also Transformers, a track that would require its own chapter). When asked by many passers-by, the T-shirt bearers shrug their shoulders: they had no idea that "Linkin Park" was a band. There is a percentage of people, especially young women, who wear the logo as well as many other extreme bands, like Burzum, following an aesthetic trend.

So simple, so complicated: Noelle Mateer, a journalist at Wired, has done a lot of research to get to the bottom of the question only to find that there are no big answers. "Kinkin Park" and its variants are one of the most massively sold T-shirts and at prices that can only be below cost on the Taobao platform. Why?

Some speculate about "third shift piracy": a foreign customer who holds the legitimate copyright asks a Chinese manufacturer to make certain products for him. The manufacturer only declares manufacturing in two shifts, but the company puts in a third shift of clandestine work that it will use to sell within its country. This third shift will be where the lower quality products end up, such as the misspelled name of the band. Mateer, like other redditers, also speculates if the representatives of the group did not come up with the orders, generating an excess of stock for which then it would be necessary to try to place it for two hard.

But between the execution of the trick I have described and the point of sale where the venerated T-shirt is today, there is a missing link that explains its massive popularity. It could be a feedback game: as the garment was very cheap, many people added it to their shopping cart along with the pieces they did want to buy. And since many people started wearing it on the street, a so-called effect was created, so other retailers started making it to keep this successful train going.