“Come to Wansuishan and you have to book a styling session and change into a period look,” remarked one visitor from Chengdu, describing a stop that has become routine in the city of Kaifeng. “You walk into the park in character. It is a lot of fun.”
That impulse showed up in the numbers. Meituan released consumption data on October 4 covering the first three days of the National Day holiday, and costume styling, once a niche add-on at a handful of landmarks, had spread across the country’s scenic spots.
A Styling Boom Across Scenic China
Searches tied to dressing up at the sites rose almost everywhere. Compared with last year, searches for styling at the Palace Museum climbed more than 144 percent, at Hetou Old Street 86 percent, at Gexian Village 69 percent and at Fenghuang Ancient Town 102 percent. Travelers now look up a destination and its costume options together, the platform’s data suggests, rather than deciding on the view alone.
Places rich in ethnic culture and natural scenery were just as busy. Searches for styling in the Miao village cluster jumped more than 300 percent year on year, while Dai-style costume photography in Xishuangbanna rose 96 percent. For those destinations the appeal is a costume that belongs to the landscape, not a generic period robe.
Kaifeng Leads the Holiday Wave
Kaifeng had the sharpest spike. Searches for “Wansuishan styling” rose more than 180 percent year on year, and the terms “Kaifeng ethnic costume photography” and “styling travel photography” both hit record daily volumes, up 200 percent on the city’s September daily average. On October 2 alone, bookings for ethnic costume photography in Kaifeng were 181 percent higher than a year earlier.
The driver sits upstream. Wansuishan Swordsman City, the martial-arts-themed park that anchors the trend, saw its own visitor interest surge more than 22-fold over the holiday and reached its daily capacity on several days, prompting visitor caps and same-day ticket suspensions. The crowded park pulled the styling trade along with it. A manager at a local studio, Songyou Hanfu, said bookings ran full from the start of the break, with the best-selling group package combining costume rental and styling; some customers added a photo shoot, and the studio’s Meituan orders more than doubled over the week.
At Hanyuan Stele Forest, changing clothes has become part of the visiting itself. Men in Song-style robes, young women with pearl hairpins and children with hair buns moved through the grounds in character, turning a walk past stone inscriptions into what visitors call a day lived as a Song-era resident. Styling, the park visit and the performance around it fold into one outing.
Official support followed the demand. Meituan worked with Kaifeng’s culture, radio, television and tourism bureau and the scenic spots on a National Day Hanfu Styling Season, which drew close to a hundred styling merchants in the city and was meant to make prices and service packages clearer to customers. For a trade that grew quickly on word of mouth, the push is an attempt to standardize what travelers get.
The economics run deeper than a single photo. For visitors, a costume and a session of styling work as an entry ticket into a site’s story; for merchants, the bundle of styling, robe rental, a follow-shoot and retouching stretches one pose into a spending chain that can last hours. Meituan’s staff noted the same pattern is turning costume photography into a fresh increment for city consumption, and that the spread of the trend beyond old town landmarks, to museums, mountain resorts and ethnic villages, points to how elastic the demand has become.
