Illustration: Liu Rui

How much do young Chinese white-collar workers love luxury goods? Take a glance at the crowded commuters on the Shanghai subway every morning, and you can tell. Arrayed in Louis Vuitton and Prada, hordes of eager consumers cram themselves into subway cars on the way to their office jobs.

My female friends all have at least one or two luxury items, like a Burberry scarf or a Miu Miu handbag. If they can't afford a handbag, they'll buy a purse. If their purse is empty, they'll turn to shanzhai (copycat) products. High-end fakes cost a lot too, but they can be picked up cheaply on online shopping sites like Taobao.

The cheapest option is a paper bag of the kind in which luxury goods are packaged. Buy a copycat Louis Vuitton paper bag, walk into the office, and put it on your desk, and you'll get admiring remarks from colleagues. "Wow, you must have gone to Hang Lung Plaza (a famous Shanghai mall) this weekend!"

It only takes a little money to satisfy one's vanity. The effect is almost the same as buying a genuine product for tens of thousands of yuan. And a paper bag has much lower risk than a fake handbag. Even high-quality imitations have flaws in the leather covering, inner liner, and needlework. If a sharp-eyed colleague recognizes the fake, you'll be left red-faced. The money's spent, but it only bought shame.

A paper bag is more secure. For a decent copycat workshop, making a fake branded bag, indistinguishable from a real one, is a piece of cake. And they only cost 3 to 50 yuan ($0.48 to $7.94). With a mere 100 yuan, you can display Chloé today and Hermès tomorrow.

Luxury goods are elegantly designed, but their extraordinary prices have pushed their symbolic meaning far beyond their practical function. Most people buy luxuries not for their looks or usefulness, but for the enormous logos. The bigger and more visible the logos, the better. The most successful logos can be seen 50 meters away by others, proving the owner's status or wealth.

So a fake package is enough to do this. With a paper bag in hand, you can tell the world a lot of lies. I have bought luxury goods, I'm rich, I have good taste, I'm very successful, my husband loves me a lot.

White-collar workers are after just this kind of psychological satisfaction. They need luxury goods to arm themselves in the battles of office politics, and to show off in front of possible clients. This has prompted a culture of flaunting wealth.

This atmosphere is most apparent in high-grade office buildings. Colleagues always get excited when talking about fashion trends. Some of them are regular consumers of well-known brands. If you don't have a single branded item, you look alien and out of place. The gossip around the water cooler is about who has bought the latest product or is wearing a limited-edition pair of shoes.

But people's incomes remain the same. Most white-collar workers have to save their salary for several months for a Chanel handbag.

In these months, they might choose to eat or drink less, but they still have to pay for rent, water, electricity, and communication. That's what makes the paper bag such a tempting alternative.

Being a white-collar worker is too exhausting. I have recently noticed the new criteria for being a white-collar worker circulating on the Internet: monthly salary of 20,000 yuan ($3,176), and a car worth 150,000 yuan. That was a blow at first. According to the criteria, I am not a white-collar worker at all, and neither are those subway commuters.

But perhaps throwing away that title will be a liberation. Without the pressure to consume, we can remove our disguises, live within our incomes, and relax.

The author is a freelance writer based in Shanghai. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn