Calvin Hui's The Art of Useless: Fashion, Media and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China analyses the emergence of middle-class subjectivity as the dominant cultural subjectivity in the People's Republic of China. Reversing what he claims is the usual assumption in social sciences that the class comes first and its culture follows, Hui's premise is that the culture can “call into being” subjectivity (p. 2). As this invocation of Althusser's concept of interpellation implies, he works within the tradition of Western Marxist theory and cultural studies, using a dazzling array of texts from feature films to fashion, and novels to news reports.

The “Useless” in the title of the book is ironic. It references the title of a fashion-as-art exhibition held by the Chinese designer Ma Ke at Paris Fashion Week in 2007 and a documentary film by Jia Zhangke about Ma Ke, produced in the same year, which Hui analyses in his first chapter. His point is that something as seemingly frivolous as fashion has serious consequences. The exhibition and the film are the focus of his first chapter, in which he argues that Jia's film questions Ma's claims that handmade clothing undoes the alienation of worker from their products and consumers in industrial production. However, where Hui shows true insight is to point out that Jia does more than show how little connection there is between the people who make the clothes for Ma by hand and the audiences that go to the exhibition. First, in his interviews with former tailors who used to hand-make clothes and now have to find other work, Jia shows that even they build aura around the factory-produced clothes they now buy through associating them with personal stories, challenging the assumption that our relationship to industrial production is always alienated. Second, by bringing together footage of factory production in China, Jia's shops and exhibitions, and the consumers, he also de-alienates and reconnects the relationships that globalization attempts to occlude by dispersal.

This sophistication that resists simple judgments distinguishes the analysis in the whole book. The first half focuses on consumption. Chapter two takes the desire for a high-class Western-style suit in Xie Tieli's 1964 film Never Forget to analyse consumerism and middle-class culture before the Cultural Revolution, not as a lag from the “Old Society” but as a product of socialism itself, inducing distinctive anxieties and challenges. The third chapter moves on to the post-Cultural Revolution period, using Romance on Lu Mountain (directed by Huang Zumo in 1980) as its key text. The film is famous for both the first kiss in PRC cinema and its numerous fashionable outfits. Hui argues that it participates in a revisionist discourse that proposes consumerism and romance as freeing Chinese people, and women in particular, from the constraints of the previous era, but which actually limits the range of gender expression available to women by labelling alternatives as “masculinization.” The fourth chapter approaches various texts, including the novel and films constructed around Li Ke's Du Lala character, as personal development guides for their audiences. Ironically, by engaging in this process in an effort to realize subjectivity, they also objectify and produce themselves, undercutting their original utopian impulses.

The two chapters in the final part of the book turn to the occluded underside of consumerism, looking respectively at factory work and garbage. Chapter five focuses on documentaries that include factory workers’ desire for the high-end products they produce. Using concepts such as Lauren Berlant's “cruel optimism,” Hui argues that the workers’ desire for the products portrayed leads them to be exploited in ways that doom any possibility of accessing the good life they dream of. His final chapter takes Wang Jiuliang's famous 2010 documentary Beijing Besieged by Waste to consider the cultural meaning of rubbish as a return of the repressed and scavenging as a utopian impulse that disrupts the temporality of the consumer economy.

The Art of Useless is a sophisticated analysis that is ambitious in its historical and textual scope. It is at its best when it produces multi-layered analysis such as that outlined here for the first chapter on Ma Ke and Jia Zhangke. However, Hui's assumption that social scientists ignore or reject the power of culture is not completely convincing, not least because he frequently cites the work of social scientists to support his own claims. Furthermore, while it certainly makes sense to challenge the contemporary ideology of femininity in China and to join the scholars returning to the Mao era to produce a more complex understanding of it, to argue that the Red Guards were “more democratic and inclusive” and “subjects” whereas middle-class consumers are mere “objects” (pp. 158–159) is surprising in its implication that the Red Guards somehow escaped ideology and interpellation. Scholarship such as Sun Peidong's 2013 Shishang yu zhengzhi: Guangdong minzhong richang zhuozhang shishang 1966–1976 (Fashion and Politics: Everyday Fashion of the Cantonese People, 1966–1976) (People's Publishing House) – surprisingly ignored in Hui's work – produces a very different understanding of the politics of clothing and gender difference in that period.