Fruit vendors in China came up with a novel idea to sell peaches for the romantic Qixi festival on August 2. They put a sexy spin on the otherwise innocent fruit by slipping some specially designed panties on them! It’s actually quite amusing, how closely the lingerie-donning peaches resemble a woman’s backside.
It all started when a fruit vendor in Nanjing decided to slip underwear onto a few of his peaches. According to Yao Xiao Yang, founder of ‘Fruithunters, he was inspired by literature. “What we understand about fruit is too simple; fruits are wonderful presents given to us by nature,” he explained.
“Fruit being sexy is widely accepted in world literature. Names of many fruits are self-evident, such as Sodom apple and Venus nipple peach. On an ancient Egyptian script pomegranate meant breasts, a French poet compared women’s butts to melons under the sunshine and James Joyce made similar comparisons in Ulysses.”
“People in the east have not been direct and open about fruits’ sexy shapes until now, but people in the west are more straightforward,” he added. By putting underpants on peaches, we are presenting the undecorated beauty of fruits, telling people that fruit is sexy and that they are gifts endowed upon us by God. That’s how we were inspired to make these.”
Incidentally, the peaches he uses are from Wuxi, a place in China that’s also famous for its lingerie and garment industry. The panty peaches are being sold as a novelty present; they come in a neatly wrapped box-of-nine. They aren’t cheap, of course, at 498 yuan ($80) a box. But that isn’t stopping people from snatching them up whenever they can find them. In fact, they’ve become so popular that they’re receiving widespread coverage in Chinese media.
Yao Xiao said that their peach sales had peaked just before the festival – they even had to raise the prices, but they still couldn’t meet the high demand. “During the three days around Chinese Valentine’s Day none of us slept or got any rest,” he said. “We were processing online orders all the time.”
And now that the festival is over, the orders haven’t stopped pouring in. They’re still having the specialty underwear produced and peaches delivered. According to Yao Xiao, the customers buying panty peaches are mostly young girls, including daughters who are gifting them to their parents!
Naturally, photographs of the cheeky panty peaches have gone viral and are receiving widespread media coverage. Several people seem to be delighted by them, while others think they’re just gross and vulgar. “Many people say that we do not have moral standards, but this means that they don’t understand fruit,” Yao Xiao clarified. “We are simply the first to use our creative idea on fruits. We strive for the combination of good taste with beauty.”
Many other vendors in China have started striving for the same combination as well, by copying the idea of panty peaches. So Yao Xiao is now applying for a panty peach patent and also filing for infringement with the intellectual property bureau. Sadly, he’s also winding down distribution, while he works on the idea for his next fruit product. I hope it has nothing to do with bananas.
