We had a big week
What did Yibo do this week? So much!!!!!
Yibo had a big week! Yibo did so many things this week that just trying to cover all of it has taken up this entire newsletter!
He celebrated the 10th anniversary of his debut as an idol, which meant that we were all treated to delicious new videoshoots and tribute spreads from all his sponsors, which was precisely the content deluge that always seems to arrive just as I’m thinking we’re about to enter into a drought. We got multiple versions of Yibo looking like a stately business executive clad in a sober black suit, except that then it turned out he was wearing a small angel on his back. This is one of his weirder looks ever, as it turns out, and I personally love the incongruity of it. Fully “business in the front, party in the back,” complete with built-in shag rug, I guess!
Wang Yibo what is this We also got another nice mid-autumn festival video from him, with follow-up material from his August concert photoshoot. This one emphasizes these quizzical Chanel earbuds-slash-necklace things, which he models like an absolute pro:
Yibo’s modeling instincts are always superb Speaking of Chanel, we also got an updated custom playlist from their official “house ambassador” to accompany the debut of those weird-ass earbuds. Last year’s playlist (which is on Chanel’s official Spotify account, ICYMI!) was wide-ranging and fun, demonstrating Yibo in a playful, exploratory mood. This year, however, the playlist is shorter, the songs are decidedly emo, and the entire theme screams “breakup playlist.” Yibo, what happened here, and why did it apparently result in a fixation with Linkin Park?!
(Disclaimer: My friend who’s been happily married for decades tells me she just made a breakup playlist the other day purely because she likes angsty songs, and we already knew Yibo likes angsty songs, so if you don’t want to read into his musical choices, I fully give you permission to abstain! I, however, will be over here obsessing over who hurt Yibo and who I have to ritually disembowel, et cetera. I kid, I kid! *nervous laughter*)
Rabbit hole #3: brands and brand rankings????!!!
Perhaps not coincidentally, we also found out this week that two of Yibo’s sponsors for which he’s a major ambassador, Chanel and Anta, moved respectively into the #2 and #3 spots on an annual consumer list of biggest fashion and beauty brands. Not bad, Yibo, not bad! The full list is paywalled, alas, and viewable data from the actual website has Chanel at #3 and suggests that Anta’s earnings actually decreased, causing it to drop to #26 on the overall list — but the report’s Twitter account shared a chart with these numbers for, apparently, “strongest apparel brands.” Don’t ask me how Anta could be #26 on one list and #3 on another very similar list by the same research firm, for I am not a brand analyst. Yibo’s cosmetics sponsor Pechoin also reportedly ranked at #13 worldwide in the same report, but I couldn’t find a mention of that one at all.
Of note is that Yibo abruptly had to drop his beloved former sponsor, Nike, in 2021 due to public backlash over their decision to stop using Xinjiang cotton. Yibo immediately pivoted and became a rep for Nike competitor Anta, and Anta has been very, very good to Yibo, even to the extent of co-sponsoring, along with Audi, his undoubtedly costly attempts to enter racing. They’ve kept this up even as he wrecks one insanely expensive racecar after another. (Sorry, Yibo, but it’s true, you keep spinning out and driving them off the track and then they stop working! You have a long way to go! Your sponsors are completely deranged for fronting you all the money for this! You are probably the only celebrity alive who could even get away with it! It’s a good thing you’re cute!!!!!)
And they always make him look very fetching in all his fancy sportswear — witness this brand-new promo for Anta Outdoors, which seems obviously coded to reference Exploring The Unknown’s rainforest sequence:
What a charming explorer See also this new promo for Anta Skate (Anta also had a busy, busy week in Yibo):
And then there’s this brand-new look from Yibo’s latest trip to Paris. I LOVE this. Love. It. It’s so impressionist, it’s so Parisian, so arty, so atypical in Yibo’s style, but he looks amazing and wears it so well, and those fucking green-soled tennis shoes just seal the whole look. I love it so much. 10/10, no notes, well done, Anta.
Yibo looking like a million bucks in casual wear, just hanging out in Paris. GAH. He looks amazing but also I would wear this outfit every chance I could. One totally tangential shout-out I’d like to give is to Jeans West, which is sort of a dark horse Yibo sponsor compared to all his other sportier and more luxury clothing brands, but dadgunnit if they don’t make him look amazing every time! Like this new mid-autumn promo:
The first thing that comes to mind here is NECK and look that is just a really good way to sell sweatshirts That is just a sweatshirt. How does it look so good. HOW. Please explain. And then there is this other recent JeansWest look from a promo shoot that dropped this week, which I’ve been obsessing over for days:
Effortless cool I love everything about this look, it feels so like, early-Aughts Abercrombie in a good way! truly don’t know when Jeans West stepped up its game but I was not expecting this. The whole studio aesthetic and the emphasis on dark blues that aren’t denim just makes this work so well. For casual wear, I’m really shocked! And then there’s this!
YIBO IN LAVENDER! WE LOVE TO SEE IT! WHAT! THIS IS PURPLE! IT LOOKS SO COMFY. THIS IS BANANAIN LEVELS OF CUTE, YET SOMEHOW STYLISH? It’s ribbed, too, how is this so cute and comfy and how does he look so cuddly, and how is Jeans West still like “let’s give this a MANLY CATCHPHRASE” i don’t understand anything but i’m so pleased.
JeansWest recently revealed that their entire revenue increased by 80 fucking percent from 2023 to 2024, and they credited this increase entirely to Wang Yibo. (ETA: This appears to have been a mistranslation or a misspeak; they later clarified that their revenue from, specifically, Taobao and TMall was what had increased by 80 percent over the last year, while their overall revenue increased by 67.2 percent. Which is still insane!!) And I feel like Yibo’s brands sign him up, process how successful the partnership is, and then go, holy shit, we have to step up our work if we’re gonna be worthy of this absolute DEITY WE HAVE MODELING OUR SHIT. they all seem to have really leveled up lately, perhaps in response to Yibo singlehandedly doubling their profit margins?!, and I don’t hate it a bit.
(Tune in next time for an Evisu babble, I can sense it, it’s coming)
One and Only, Yibo’s street dance movie, was recently released in Japan and has been doing really well there! It had good crowds and has had a couple of special showings featuring Zin of Hilty and Bosch (complete with dancing!), a pair of legendary locking partners who were part of Yibo’s team in Street Dance of China season 4. The film was also featured in the 2024 Chinese Film Week, which took place this week in both Melbourne and Vancouver. What a delight!
(It’s not all sunshine, however; perhaps due to One and Only’s success, Formed Police Unit is now scheduled to be released in Japan in January. We shall not speak of it. 😶)
Into the Unknooooooooown (except this is Yibo, he is a known quantity)
Exploring The Unknown is up to six episodes! Previously mentioned MTJJ wyb_forever has subbed them all:
Episode 1 (though for some reason this is missing the last 10 minutes) and Episode 2 (the rainforest)
Tigrosaurus on Twitter has also been subbing the eps (including the complete first episode); you can DM them for links.
The latest two eps, in which Yibo goes cave-diving and rappelling off the side of a giant cliff, were a lovely respite from the previous sequence, which as I mentioned was all about him battling altitude sickness as he forces his way up a 3,500-foot (ETA: 3,500 METRE!) mountain. Jesus. Even writing that makes it sound unhinged.
I don’t think anyone was prepared for how difficult it was — it’s so rare for us to see Yibo have difficulty doing anything. That’s probably been a carefully cultivated part of his brand, so it’s really fascinating — and harrowing, frankly — to see him show us just how much he struggled with even the basics on the mountain. It was really, really hard to watch, even knowing that after the fact, he’s fine. He genuinely struggled even to put one foot in front of the other, and he was clearly battling exhaustion and should have rested for longer than he did before trying the mountain again after experiencing illness. But Yibo never rests; he is who he is, and watching him battle that mountain and then make it, somehow, all the way to the unbelievably steep top — it wasn’t something I was quite emotionally prepared for, but I’m so happy for him that he made it.
And, even in the middle of all that he still managed to pull out one of his patented gremlin grins for his gege:
This was a hilarious moment — Yibo asking his guide why he suddenly started performing like an actor Unexpectedly, that’s what made the cave sequence so lighthearted. I was absolutely petrified of both halves of this — watching him squeeze himself through impossibly tiny crevices in the cave and then swinging in mid-air 70 feet (ETA: 70 METRES!) above the ground seemed like not-fun times in yibo land! But his guide for these eps, Wang Hao, apparently is really familiar with Yibo and accordingly structured his cave training like a series of increasingly advanced challenges. That was pure catnip for Yibo, who was just bouncing around burbling and making cute noises and enjoying the hell out of himself the whole time, and gazing at everything around him in a state of pure wonder.
Ahhhhhh just look at him!!!!!!! It was such a contrast to the mountains, and such a complete contrast to what I thought it would be like — this was supposed to be Yibo battling his fear of the dark, after all! But he didn’t seem afraid at all, not even when he said he lost his confidence or had a moment when he was about to plunge over the edge of the cliff and realized, oh, shit, that’s high. The Yibo-ness of it all was really striking — I felt like we learned so much about him and his approach to all of these exercises, and yet were also seeing the pure distilled essence of who he is — adventurous, curious about absolutely everything, such a tremendously fast learner (Wang Hao later said Yibo was the fastest learner of the students he’s trained.)
This kid. We’re all in thrall to him, and he’s in thrall to life itself. Of course I’m not the only one who’s observed this. Idlemovieblog on Weibo reportedly recently penned a long blog post about EtU, which a fan helpfully partially translated for us. “Wang Yibo in the [show] is his true self, and we can see his admirable excellent qualities … this is the power of role models, which make people progress and get better with [them].”
The whole post is quite long, but it outlines many of the same points that all Yibo’s trainers and laoshis and collaborators always say about him, which they all tend to post about right as his latest project is releasing. It’s so common at this point that I began to wonder if maybe they were all getting paid to spread the same narrative about Yibo. And we’ve now had three different guides who worked with Yibo on this show all echo the same themes of his curiosity, hard work, persistence in overcoming obstacles, cleverness, and sense of wonder. Even though I agree with them all, I did have a moment of skepticism about the timing.
After all, we know some of this is exaggerated for effect; though there was a running theme in this week’s episodes of Yibo going into the dark and battling his personal fears in the primal isolation of the cave, in reality there were tons of crew members everywhere and it was hilariously bright and chaotic. And even though Yibo thrives in that kind of environment, it doesn’t necessarily make the whole ‘facing your fears in a cave’ thing authentic.
Except then this Wang Hao-laoshi came along and he’s so obviously someone who knew and admired Yibo before the start of this series. At one point they’re in the cave and Yibo happily starts humming something, and Wang Hao immediately picks up on it and asks him for an impromptu concert which is, no contest, the most relatable thing anyone has ever done in a cave. (Yibo, alas, refused, ostensibly because he was too apprehensive, which we all know is a lie because he was bopping around making cute noises (no really they are such cute noises!!!!), learning SRT and looping ropes and typing knots and sticking his head into cave holes to check out cool albino millipedes. We will get into reasons for his possible refusal shortly!)
At another point, he was explaining that he designed the challenges as immersion therapy for Yibo, because “everyone knows Yibo is afraid of the dark,” and he said it SO casually that it simultaneously threw me and then made me marvel, because it is absolutely true that so many facets of Wang Yibo’s personality are extremely well known by the public — more so than just about any other celebrity I can think of.
A lot of this is because he’s ingenious at turning his personality into his personal brand, so that you’re not just getting a generic idol, but this specific idol who’s into all these other things like street dance, hip-hop, fashion, racing, motorcycles, various sports, even LEGOS and puzzles, one of which probably overlaps with your own interests or with the interests of someone you know, and doesn’t that make him just that much more endearing? But the “being scared of the dark” thing — that’s such a fandom thing to me, more than a branding thing. So for Wang Hao to say it so casually suggests that either Wang Hao is a secret stan (possible!) or there’s a significant amount of overlap between Wang Yibo’s enormous fandom and the casual passerby’s understanding of Yibo (equally possible!). I think both are likely, because honestly Yibo is such a huge star that I can see his personality becoming that well known to that many people.
And that makes this whole project that much more extraordinary to me. Just think about it: what other celebrity have you even heard of who's just like, "what if I take a break from acting for a little bit after having just filmed four movies and a hit tv series back to back to back to back to back, and instead of announcing what my next project will be I go silent for half a year, kill all that momentum, and instead I go off and climb a mountain and do a bunch of other stuff.” And THEN, not only does he do that, but he somehow manages to pitch it to Warner Brothers — fucking Warner Bros! — as a full-fledged TV docuseries, which allows him to get sponsors to pay for the entire trip, and then drops it on the unsuspecting public to, basically, MAYHEM.
Like. What!!!! What is happening! THAT IS SO MANY PEOPLE WHO ARE NOW CLIMBING A MOUNTAIN JUST BECAUSE WANG YIBO DID IT FIRST. PEOPLE! THAT IS A MOUNTAIN! WHAT IS THIS!!!!
What is happening!!!!!!!!!!!! All of this just highlights what a perfect choice Yibo was to be the torchbearer for the Olympics. He’s a huge, huge star, yes — but this is exactly why he was chosen; it really had nothing to do with his level of fame. He didn’t do this because he was trying to improve his brand or make himself more marketable as a purveyor of extreme sports; he did it just because he loves being outdoors, doing physical activities, and experiencing new things.
At the press conference for the show, Duhua (the director of his agency Yuehua) told us that he started trying to persuade Yuehua into letting him do it at least two years ago. It’s absolutely not a coincidence that that timing aligns with the end of Yibo’s run on Day Day Up; this show is so very, very DDU-coded, full of fun exploratory challenges for Yibo to try, ways for him to stretch himself and expand his skill set, travel to cool new places, and with an underlying educational approach to everything he does. But it’s also pure Yibo, this show — the determination to do what he’s never done before, just to see if he can. He’s not just a superstar’s superstar; he is, truly, an athlete’s athlete. He embodies the spirit of sport — not just the dogged persistence but the attitude of play, the sense of satisfaction just from the effort. I can’t believe Yibo bopping around in a cave or swinging on a cave nearly a hundred feet in the air are now comfort images for me, when they were fraught with terror before these episodes dropped! And yet that’s all entirely because of Yibo himself, and his attitude of endless openness to the possibilities inside of himself and in the world around him.
What will Yibo do next!
Oh boy, so many things! A number of fashion shows in Milan and Paris are upon us, and Yibo is heavily rumored to be traveling to the Jimmy Choo show in Milan next week, and then again to Paris Fall Fashion Week for Lacoste, Channel, and Loewe just a week later. He also has multiple upcoming awards shows and a Lacoste gala in Beijing interspersed with these overseas jaunts, however, and it’s unclear which, if any, he’ll try to do, or if he’ll try to squeeze all of them in given his workaholic tendencies and his total inability to stay more than 24 hours in a place if he doesn’t have to be there.
Simultaneously, the word on the street is that Yibo’s longed-for year-end concert series is absolutely happening, and will be announced later this year, probably November, shortly before they actually take place. Expect an absolute bloodbath to get tickets. I have no idea how one buys a ticket for a concert in China, but if anyone would like to tell me, I would deeply appreciate it — what’s a few years of one’s life savings for a chance to see Yibo in concert, sob
Bolstering this theory is a promo image from Yibo’s big anniversary week. It’s celebrating all of his shows as well as his individual singles (the soundtrack songs and his songs with Uniq were left off the list, probably due to space). But as you can see, it’s also potentially promoting some sort of forthcoming Yibo retrospective… like a box set or perhaps an album you can buy at his concert?
Yibo in his weird coat promoting a decade of artistry Obviously it could just be for show, but it’s hard not to ignore the timing of this theoretical record showing up just as Yibo’s theoretical concerts are set to take place. Let us throw money at you, sir, we are ready.
The Japanese magazine Movie Star, which seems to focus on international subjects, recently announced it will feature Yibo on its cover for its upcoming November issue. Their sister magazine, Inrock (for music) featured The Untamed on their cover in July, and they clearly have a thing for both Yibo and Xiao Zhan, so more power to the press! Meanwhile, the Thai network Channel 9 will reportedly be showing Hidden Blade starting September 21 as part of its special Saturday screening lineup on the show Nine Theatre, so if anyone has access, don’t miss it!
Whew. This update took up so much time and space that I’m sparing you what I’d originally intended to write about as our kind of philosophical tentpole; however, I think Exploring The Unknown puts us right in that headspace already, doesn’t it? It’s turning out to be such a nice series. Wang Yibo, you really never miss.
Mid-autumn festival has come and gone for this year, but a happy belated celebration to all of you! To send you off, let’s enjoy Yibo performing “Moments of You” in 2022, for the CCTV’s Mid-autumn gala.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKzcsMuoSQcSee you next week! Don’t do anything Yibo wouldn’t do — which pretty much leaves you open to everything and anything.