![]() ![]() When it was over, the music shifted and the gift-wrapped models tottered down the runway on ridiculous dominatrix heels (also gift-wrapped), wearing shiny, crenulated sacks, heaps of fabric that looked like…heaps of fabric. And he possessed an ancient authority, of 80 unflinching years on earth: He didn’t seem to give a shit if anyone got what he was doing. His face was elastic with emotion, joy and fear and joy again. But it was arresting, and if anything, Wang knows how to move his body in a way that mesmerizes. He acted out the story of a little kid trying to get home, or an old man who’s a little kid trying to get home, or something like that. ![]() Soon enough, the house lights went down, a swirling wind sounded, and the old man stepped onto the stage, lost in his hurricane pantomime. “They’ll have to catch both of us.” But Wang was asking the question from experience, for he’d been censored by the Chinese government back in the ’90s. He was just Wang Deshun, he of a wife, two children, and a grandkid, who when he took his shirt off seemed as if he’d just blown in from frolicking in the Fountain of Youth with a bunch of Chippendales dancers. He hadn’t yet established himself as the next frontier, the new nexus where sex and old age meet to look ageless and sexy again (prompting people on YouTube to praise Grandpa’s “gorgeous stomach”), nor had he given his TED-like talks about the walk. To the 1.4 billion people of China, he wasn’t even lao xianrou, a name soon affixed to him, which translates as, of course, Old Fresh Meat. In that comparatively calm backstage moment before the walk, as he was being fussed over one last time, Hottest Grandpa wasn’t yet Hottest Grandpa. And because the female models had their faces gift-wrapped, wearing little steampunk glasses and cat ears, his was the only face-and flesh-truly visible. ![]() He-Hottest Grandpa-would perform a pantomime to begin the show, a scene in which he would battle a high wind, and then later would lead the female models out for their curtain call. He was fitted with padded cotton pants, and the designer, Hu Sheguang, shared with him that evening’s plan. Hottest Grandpa, who is 80 now, with an unruly Confucian Vandyke, stood backstage as minions coiffed his corona of white hair and tenderized his hairless chest with baby oil, his pecs pulsating to a techno beat of their own. The legend of Hottest Grandpa began one March evening two years ago, during Fashion Week in Beijing. ![]()
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