Not a Comeback, Her Husband Insists: After Years of Online Abuse, Wanwan's Clothing Store Takes ¥10 Million in a Month
Wanwan, once one of China's most loved style icons and later one of its most piled-on, has found an unlikely second act: a Taobao clothing store that cleared 10 million yuan in its first month, and a national conversation about whether the internet lets anyone come back.
The most-discussed retail story on Chinese social media this week is a clothing store that opened a month ago on Taobao and took more than 10 million yuan — roughly $1.4 million — in sales. The store belongs to Wanwan, a woman who spent a decade as one of the internet's favorite people to hate, and the reaction to her numbers says more about China's online culture than about clothes.
To understand why a shop's monthly sales drew tens of thousands of likes, you need the decade underneath. Wanwan rose to fame in the early 2010s as a style blogger and art-world figure who, with her husband Lin Han, founded M WOODS, now one of Beijing's best-known private museums. At her height she carried luxury endorsements and magazine covers. Then came years of escalating pile-ons: every appearance parsed for tone-deafness, every misstep screenshotted, until — as Lin Han recalled in a long post this week — her livestream comment sections filled with insults and mockery, and friends quietly distanced themselves. "It was as if whatever we did was wrong," he wrote.
The hot-search phrase that crowned the story this week — "even in the worst situation, there is a turning point" — comes from a comment on a post celebrating the store's numbers, one liked more than 35,000 times. The post that drew it observed that everyone always told Wanwan she should have launched a label ten years ago, when she was still beloved; "who would have thought ten years later is still not too late."
Her name is the pun the whole conversation hangs on. "Wanwan" (晚晚) reads as "late, late" — and when the brand was announced, the mockery wrote itself: too late, just like her name, the industry long dead, ten years of good timing squandered. Lin Han's post, published in full on Weibo, takes that jab head-on. He accepts the diagnosis of the lost years — "we were in our twenties; whose twenties are not reckless?" — but argues the decade changed how they work, and rejects the sports metaphor entirely: "I don't consider this a comeback or a reversal. For us it is a chance to live again, to walk again, more calmly, the road we never finished when we were young." He also concedes what audiences rarely hear from that household: that he himself became "reckless, even aggressive" online while watching his wife be abused on screen, and that he said things he should not have.
There is more in the post than clothing. M WOODS turns twelve this year — founded, he notes, in the last Year of the Horse — and on Mid-Autumn Day the museum opens a long-planned exhibition of Chinese prehistoric pottery, with the couple leading tours in person. The choice reads as deliberate: after years in which the couple's name meant scandal, they are returning to the institution that gave them standing, on a holiday about reunion.
China's internet has a reputation, richly earned, for burying people and moving on; genuine rehabilitations are rare enough that each one becomes a parable. Whether Wanwan's is earned redemption or simply a market discovering that infamy converts is argued about in every comment section under the story. What is not argued about is the money: the audience everyone said had abandoned her bought ten million yuan of clothes in a month.