By Dan Simon
When Americans think of fashion, they usually associate it with cities like New York or Milan. Many don’t realize that Tokyo is not only a top fashion city, but a city with a completely unique, multi-layered style and fashion scene.
And the styles of this city are strange, beautiful and stupefying all at once. Petite women shuffling about in silk kimonos cinched with elaborate obi (belts). Men wearing pointed shoes and boots three or four sizes too big for their feet, simply to show of that they are up on the latest trends. Schoolchildren in sailor uniforms. Teenage boys baked with golden tans and bouffant rooster-like dyed hair. Ripped jeans, man purses, jingling buttons, spikes, safety pins, fanny packs and all manner of gaudy over-the-top foolishness.
Perhaps most interesting of all, are the many and varied styles of Tokyo’s females. While a fair amount of the fashion seen around Tokyo is similar to Western styles (i.e. coach bags, tiffany jewelry, Manolo shoes and other designer articles), it often veers down skewed and incomparable paths.
One of the most common styles in Tokyo for Japanese girls (J-girl) is the infamous over-sized white T-shirt. The shirt always has a nonsensical English phrase on the front of it, which says something like, “We (heart) juicy bits.” It is almost always accompanied by a large belt, grey or black tights and boots.
There are many other J-Girl styles, almost too many to mention, so here is a quick breakdown of a few:
* Gothic Lolita: GothLoli outfits are usually modeled after Victorian-style women’s clothing and aim to make the wearer look like a dainty porcelain doll. This look is sometimes skewed to the darker side and made to look as if the doll is dead or simply given a goth look. These girls sometimes dress this way as an escape from their daily lives or as a way to get away from mockery or bullying at school.
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* Fetish: The fetish style is exactly what it sounds like; one of the most common ones is the maid or goth maid fetish. It is so popular, in fact, that maid cafes, where one pays to be served by a young girl in a maid costume, have popped up all over Tokyo. The bandage fetish is also gaining popularity.
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* Cosplay: Short for costume play, and ranges from the mundane to the insane. Usually, these girls dress up like characters from anime (Japanese animation), popular video games, or in themed costumes (Strawberry Shortcake anyone?). Again, the costumes are elaborate, colorful and sometimes highly suggestive.
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* Kogal: A particular type of fashion that describes young women with extra income and extra time who live in the heavily populated cities of Japan (Tokyo mostly). They love to show off their money with expensive clothing, hairdos, cellphones, fake fingernails and fake breasts. They even have their own “Kogalese” dialect of Japanese, drawing conspicuous comparisons to the Valley Girls of California.
* Ganguro: A style that became popular in the 1990s, it literally means”black-face” and is a trend among many Japanese girls (and some guys). This style is characterized by insanely dark tans accompanied by outrageous clothing – sometimes modeled after animals – dyed blond or multi-colored hair and white makeup. This style has faded in recent years. Ganguro girls are harder to spot these days.
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The girls sporting these fashions can usually be spotted in either the Harajuku or Shibuya areas of southwestern Tokyo. Often the cosplay and goth style aficionados travel out from the suburbs simply to strut their stuff up and down the Harajuku bridge.
Note that often times these styles blend with each other. While some J-Girls are adamant about adhering to one particular group, many mix and match styles and simply create their own look.
These are not the only styles to be seen in Tokyo, of course; lately, big belts, all manner of boots, fake nails stacked with fake jewels have been en vogue in the city.
Like style and fashion anywhere, the J-girl style is not static. Rather, it shifts and changes depending on trends in and outside of Japan. In a totally unique and wholly Japanese way, the girls of Tokyo take style and self-expression through clothing to sensationalist and fascinating heights.
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Previously in Big in Japan:
* Not Fukudome
* The Yokohama Cubs
* The Chicago Way
* Not The Olympics
* Charisma Man
* Not American Football
Posted on October 6, 2008