There is a person on IG that looks to be of East Asian descent who is a hobbyist model. They have recently taken to wearing hanfu in at least 3 photoshoots I have seen to date.

All of the hairstyles are Wrong. It may look kind of right or okay at first glance, but when you look a bit closer they just seem just a little bit off. I do not know how to explain this Exactly Precisely except for pointing out that in varying cases, it is a) too wide; b) not enough accessories in the appropriate places (you do not make a big hairstyle with a lot of empty spaces normally unless it is to put accessories in. In dynastic eras the more elaborate the hairstyle the more pins you have in it. This is because the pins hold the style and the various bits that go into that style in place. So a great big empty space is Unrealistic because it looks like Something Is Missing, unless it is a simple enough hairstyle that it can feasibly be held up with minimal pins.), for instance having pins in the front but no adornments in the back; c) in the latest post I just saw, the front sections of their hair are just Down while there are braids to the back of it. This Does Not Happen. At most you are allowed some strands of hair escaping at the front, you Cannot have whole front sections of your hair on each side down. Or else they are Too Tall and just Straight Up. Unrealistically so. It is just Wrong.

I have never seen such Wrong hairstyles in hanfu before. It Bothers me so much. Even just leaving their hair down would be better.

I realise after I have written this that it is just sad and kind of upsetting to see when people (diaspora) are trying to reconnect with their heritage and are either misinformed or miss the mark in terms of 'Actually, That's... Not It' somehow. It also annoys me because this can go on to misinform other people not from our culture as to what something is or looks like.

Like I understand that diasporic Chinese food for instance is its own thing, but like - I saw a post somewhere where a Chinese diaspora person had written in a novel all poetically about the way a particular Chinese character supposedly came to be written as it is (told, of course, to them by a 'Master Wang') - they said the word 黑 ('black', pronounced hēi) is made up of a mouth (口) bifurcated by and on top of earth/ground (土) being heated over fire (火), even going so far as to make metaphors about it.

This is completely incorrect. It's actually a field (田) on top of the earth (土) and fire below (火). It cannot be a mouth (口) because it does not account for the two dots/点 in the 'mouth' at the very top of the word 黑. Just Googling it on Wiktionary will show you this.

But it's... published in an English-language book now, this. And I came across it because some other Chinese diaspora person had shared this page, commenting that this author 'writes so evocatively of characters that it gives them such feeling' or something to that effect. When it is flat out Wrong.

It's just in the same vein of things as like - once a Chinese diasporic friend said they were looking at buying some hanfu and wanted my opinions on which, and proceeded to show me something on Etsy that, at a glance, was immediately clear to me that it wasn't hanfu; it was more Japanese (the belt/sash was wrong, it was too wide and fastened differently iirc, something like that). Or like when I and my dad wore hanfu for Chinese New Year back home in Sg, and my uncle and several other people commented like, 'Wah, wearing kimono ah/why wearing Japanese stuff?'

Like... I understand that reconnecting with heritage is a tricky thing, especially when you don't have a lot of background, which is kind of the whole thing, in many cases; and that it is a very personal thing and that in some cases as diaspora it is completely about transforming or making something new of it. But at the same time, some things really are 'right' or 'wrong', in the sense that some things do fall within a 'Yes this is how it looks like/is done' and 'Oh that's not quite how it is' circle. Like it just wouldn't be true to say that, oh, idk, Chinese people believe that the Jade Emperor is the One God. The Jade Emperor is one of the immortals we have in our lore/believe in! But it's not true that we think there's only The One God. Or something like - God forbid, wearing the collar crossed right over left (only done at funerals after the person is Dead).

You are free to break the rules - but only if you know them well enough first to know what the rules Are.