Chungking Express came out in 1994. Most of the people currently color-grading their travel photos to look like a Wong Kar-wai film were not alive for it. That's not a knock — it's the most interesting part of the story.
Somewhere in the last few years, a specific visual language — oversaturated neon, rain-slicked streets, the particular blue-green shadow that falls across a Hong Kong alley at 2am — went from "arthouse film aesthetic" to "TikTok preset with a tutorial." Lightroom presets promising "the Wong Kar-wai look" circulate freely. A photographer's pre-wedding shoot recreated the style convincingly enough that people assumed it was archival footage.
Why now
Old Hong Kong — the neon signage, the dai pai dong steam, the cramped verticality of Chungking Mansions — was never designed to be beautiful. It was just dense, functional, and unapologetically itself. It turns out that's exactly the texture a generation raised on flat, algorithm-smoothed content was starving for. Gen Z travelers are booking trips to Sham Shui Po specifically because they recognize it from a movie their parents probably haven't seen.
Nothing about that skyline was trying to be photographed. That's why it photographs so well.
There's a version of this trend that flattens into costume — treating a whole era of a city as a filter and nothing else. We'd rather use it the way it deserves: as a genuine visual reference point, tied to specific films, specific streets, specific light, not a vague gesture at "Asia" with the saturation turned up.
Where it shows up for us
Mostly in how we shoot product photography and grade lookbooks — not in slapping a neon sign on a shirt and calling it a day. If you've noticed the moodier, more saturated shots creeping into our product photos lately, now you know the reference.
For the food side of the same nostalgia, see the cha chaan teng revival, and for how we think about culture on clothing more broadly, read East Asian culture clothing.