Digital trapped aspiration: the paradox of precarious formal labor in China’s boutique fashion sector

Abstract This article examines the lived contradictions of boutique fashion salespersons in urban China, focusing on how shop managers reorganize sales work through digital platforms. Drawing on eighteen months of multi-sited ethnographic research, we show that platforms like WeChat and RedNote do not drive workers autonomously; rather, managers utilize these infrastructures to integrate in-store service, aesthetic curation, and constant online engagement into a single labor regime. We highlight three empirical patterns. First, managers exert platform-enabled control over “creative” labor by setting strict posting rules and Key Performance Indicator (KPI) like targets, turning self-branding into routine work that primarily benefits the boutique. Second, managers institutionalize “always-on” clienteling via WeChat, leveraging commission attribution to normalize unpaid after-hours messaging as a requirement of professionalism. Third, workers’ accumulated “digital assets” (followers, client networks) rarely yield career mobility because they remain materially tethered to store inventory and the brand halo, preventing portability after exit. We conceptualize this dynamic as digital trapped aspiration: a condition where workers endure intensified, partially unpaid labor to accumulate transferable cultural capital, only to find their gains structurally locked within the employer’s enterprise. Integrating labor process theory and digital labor studies, we argue that platforms function not as autonomous drivers, but as the conditions of possibility that make this managerial extraction and normalization of unpaid work enforceable and meaningful through permanent connectivity, metricized visibility, and dependence on private traffic.