Outside Facetasm in Harajuku, noted staff member Chang combines bright yellow sports gear with a tiered, ruffled, camouflage print skirt, pieces from the spring/summer 2017 collection.
— Rei Shito, street-fashion photographer
On the streets of Tokyo, visitors can’t help but notice the eclectic range of fashion styles on display. But what is perhaps most striking is the playful, open attitude. Tokyo-based fashion journalist and blogger Misha Janette (see this page) has lived in Japan for more than ten years. She tells us a story about a friend visiting Tokyo for the first time that encapsulates this open-minded attitude: “A while ago, a friend of mine came over from Berlin to Japan and said, ‘I feel at home in Tokyo.’ He is super tall with a shaggy beard and tends to stand out in a crowd. So, when he goes abroad, he often gets stared at, which makes him uncomfortable. In Tokyo, people might glance his way, but nothing more. That’s why he feels at ease here. People in Tokyo absolutely don’t give others strange looks, and this applies not only to foreigners but also to anyone dressed in an eccentric fashion. It’s been more than a decade since I started living in Tokyo, but my friend’s story reminded me how different fashion in Tokyo is.”
But why is it so different? Like the city itself, street fashion in Tokyo is a kind of beautiful chaos, always churning and moving, but with an energetic, flexible, and generous spirit that seems to drive us forward, always toward the next stage, the next thing, the next trend, the next experiment, while honoring past traditions. In this chapter, we hear from key figures in Tokyo fashion, who have witnessed the origins and the transitions of Tokyo style firsthand and who continue leading it into the future. We present a range of comments on Tokyo style as a starting-off point, highlighting some general characteristics, before exploring major street-fashion movements in greater detail in the chapters to follow.
Mike Abelson, designer and founder of Postalco, is a longtime resident of Tokyo who revels in the mix of old and new: “I love that there is simultaneously new technology and tradition side by side. There is technology like supercomputers or high-speed trains. At the same time, there is a continuation of the traditional crafts like urushi lacquerware, indigo dyeing, and fabric weaving. I love the way these traditional and contemporary needs are blended.” In creating his designs for bags and other leather accessories, Abelson often visits factories and construction sites in Japan and marvels at the attention to detail on display even in a large industrial setting: “Construction workers’ clothing can be so well designed—the shape and colors are really fresh. During a recent sweltering summer, it was interesting to see jackets with electric fans built in for ventilation. They puff up the jacket in an interesting way, changing the shape of the body. At the same time, the fans help with the serious problem of overheating.” Well-made uniforms and workers’ clothing play an important role in Tokyo street fashion, inspiring designers, shop owners, and consumers alike.
— Naho Okamoto, founder and designer, SIRI SIRI
Adrian Hogan, an Australian illustrator who is also a longtime resident of Tokyo, appreciates the high level of fashion awareness and skill among people here: “Both women and men are highly conscious of fashion. They are sensitive to trends, care about hair and makeup, and even with inexpensive clothing they have the skills to coordinate fashionably . . . and the same person can change his or her style dramatically. Maybe it’s the cosplay tradition, but thinking of it that way, Tokyo people are so rich in flexibility. They add playfulness freely, and skillfully take in cultures of Japan and foreign countries. I think that kind of attitude is reflected in their fashion very well.” United Arrows cofounder and senior adviser for creative direction Hirofumi Kurino agrees. Kurino joined the multi label select shop Beams in the late 1970s. “From a global viewpoint, Tokyo is actually a very special place. No other city exists with such diversified street-style fashion.” Even an abbreviated summary of some of the different street-fashion trends of the past few decades suggests how rich the culture is (see this page).
United Arrows cofounder and senior adviser for creative direction Hirofumi Kurino is an influential figure not only in fashion worldwide but also in music, film, design, and fine art. His keen eye for world affairs and the political economy has garnered attention for Japan’s fashion industry both nationally and internationally. In addition to his role at United Arrows and his contributions as a fashion journalist, Kurino also serves as a graduation competition judge in fashion at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and as a judge for the LVMH Prize for Young Designers.
The most influential fashion trends of the past several decades are listed chronologically below, along with a short list of defining characteristics. Some, such as the hippie, miniskirts, skinny jeans, or fast fashion trends, mirror the fashion of Europe and North America at the time; others are uniquely Japanese.
1960s–1980s
Miniskirts
The brands Mary Quant, courrèges, and others precipitated a miniskirt boom all over the world, but it was when British-born model and actress Twiggy came to Tokyo in 1967 that the trend took hold and gained momentum throughout Japan.
Ivy League/Preppie
Varsity letter jackets, slim sheath dresses or miniskirts, sweater sets, pearls, V-neck sweaters, cable knits, knee socks, and so on.
Hippie
Long hair and bell-bottom jeans (also called “trumpet trousers” or “pantalons”) worn by both men and women, oversize hats, billowing sleeves, embroidered shirts, dresses in natural materials, and dragonfly glasses.
New Tra (New Traditional)
A classic style worn by upper-class female students based on designs by Louis Vuitton and Gucci. A bag from an instantly recognizable overseas luxury brand was an essential accessory.
Takenoko-Zoku
1980s
Takenoko-Zoku (Bamboo Shoots)
Dance group trend from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s named for a popular boutique, Boutique Takenoko, on Takeshita Street in Harajuku. Participants would wear brightly colored costumes, often featuring harem suits, and dance to boom-box disco music in the pedestrian zone of Harajuku.
Karasu-Zoku (The Crows)
All-black, usually layered, billowing clothing and long overcoats paired with black flats or heavy black boots. This look was inspired by high-end designs by Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto. The trend made wearing black, which was traditionally associated with mourning, into a fashion statement.
Bodycon (Body Conscious)
Wild, permed “sauvage” hair and sexy, form-fitting minidresses to go dancing in at clubs and discos that showed off the shape of the body gained popularity among women in Tokyo from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.
Pink House
DC Brands (Designer & Character Brands)
Wearing coordinated designer-brand clothing from Japanese fashion designers from head to toe. The DC brand Pink House made its world debut at this time. Country-style floral motifs were popular among women.
Late 1980s–1990s Mixing styles and brands gained popularity with the rise of select shops.
Shibu-Caji (Shibuya Casual)
Derived from American casual styles worn by college students in the US, men and women coordinated jeans, loafers, and dark blue blazers.
French Casual
As the name suggests, a French-inspired style featuring cropped cigarette pants, Breton stripes, berets, and so on. Made popular by brands such as agnès b., chic styling with only a few key pieces became popular.
Urahara (Ura-Harajuku/Backstreet Harajuku Tribe)
Brands such as Undercover, A Bathing Ape, Porter, and others who had set up stores in the back streets of Harajuku (“ura“ means “back” in Japanese) were huge hits among young men who identified with the minimalist, functional street fashions they offered. For women, “boys’ style” swept the streets with oversize T-shirts paired with colorful skinny jeans. The “sneaker hunting” phenomenon, in which people wearing rare, popular models of Nike Air Max sneakers would actually be robbed of their shoes, took off around this time.
Kogal
Kogal (School Girl)
A trend based on meticulously arranged school girl uniforms with supershort miniskirts, long sweaters, and long, loose, white bunched socks worn like leg warmers with dark loafers. Kogals would dye their hair brown, get deep salon tans, and wear white eye makeup to go out shopping at 109 (a fashion building in Shibuya). Kogal style eventually evolved into Yamaba Gal style, whose ghostlike white hair and makeup is meant to look like something out of a ghost story.
2000s–2010s
Sub-Kal Kei (Subculture Girls)
Styles born out of subculture and music, including anime. Factions of this movement includes Cosplay, Decora, and Lolita styles.
Decora
Decora
A Harajuku street-fashion craze that involved a large number of brightly colored accessories (bows, clips, pins, Band-Aids, ribbons, stickers) all worn at once and attached to low ponytails and bangs. These accessories would “decorate” and even obscure the face and clothes (usually dark or neon-colored hooded sweatshirts paired with ballet tutus). Originally documented by Shoichi Aoki in the street-fashion magazine FRUiTS in the late 1990s through the early 2000s.
Lolita
Lolita
Harajuku fashion style with many subgroups, including Gothic, Kodano, and so on, characterized by an exaggerated girlish style of clothing with fitted waists; short, full skirts; petticoats; pinafores; and aprons, worn with curled, colored hair and doll-like makeup.
Skinny Jeans
Styles inspired by J-pop stars, foreign celebrities, and models, based on low-rise skinny jeans worn with elastic-heel ballet flats, became hugely popular. Around this time, denim designed and manufactured in Japan gained recognition and popularity.
Fast Fashion
Styling with cheap, mass-produced, on-trend clothes from overseas brands such as H&M, Zara, Forever21, and others became popular, along with “high-low” blended styling that accessorized clothes from these brands with a luxury designer bag.
Mori Girl
Mori Girl (Forest Girl)
A nostalgically feminine, pretty, earthy trend, meant to evoke a “girl who runs through the forest” and characterized by natural, floaty fabrics, floral prints, long skirts and dresses, and long curled hair adorned with flowers.
New Standard
Simple, back-to-basics style, popularized by brands like Muji, involving matching sweater sets, Levi’s jeans and white T-shirts, flat-front chinos, and Converse sneakers.
Urban Outdoor
Inspired by a mountaineering and hiking boom among young men and women beginning around 2010, this style involved wearing outdoor sportswear such as camping gear, fleeces, cargo pants, and hiking boots in the city. Down linings and vests were particularly popular among men and women of all ages across Japan.
Nineties Revival & MA-1 Flight Jackets
Military-inspired urban gear, based on fighter-pilot-style jackets (also called blouson in Japan) and worn with jeans or dresses became iconic elements in the 1990s-revival style, in which old silhouettes were deformed, expanded, or destroyed to create new looks, and wearing vintage clothing with new clothes became popular.
— Kumiko Takano, editor in chief, ACROSS magazine
In August 1980, a Japanese magazine and research institute called ACROSS began investigating youth fashion culture in Shibuya, Harajuku, and Shinjuku, three areas of Tokyo known for their vibrant youth fashion scenes. The magazine used a method called “teitenkansoku” or “fixed-point observation.” They wanted to record changing fashion trends over time by focusing on the clothing worn by regular people on the streets in these areas. Once a month, ACROSS editors would go out on location, set up a camera, and photograph and interview people who passed by.
Kumiko Takano is the editor in chief of ACROSS. She also serves as an expert adviser to the Japan Fashion Color Association. After first joining PARCO as an editor in 1992, Takano was appointed editor in chief in 2000. PARCO, the storied Japanese retail chain, was the first store to carry designs from Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto and has been shaping Japanese fashion through its selections and its publications for generations. We ask Takano for her thoughts about the major developments in Tokyo street style over the years, and how those changes are still relevant today. “Looking back at Tokyo’s street-style fashion from the beginning of teitenkansoku, we see that from the early 1980s, ‘designer and character’ brands, shortened to ‘DC’ in Japanese, were in their prime,” Takano explains.
Not long after ACROSS began stopping people on the streets, the big trend in Tokyo was a unified, coordinated style, usually with clothes from a single designer. “Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto were first on the list,” Takano says, talking about the most popular DC brands, “and unifying attire from head to toe under a single brand name was the most popular style back then. People wanted to share the creative aspirations of the designer by wearing brand-name clothing and they had a strong desire to embody the overall style being suggested by the designer.”
By the early 1990s, according to Hirofumi Kurino, “people learned how fun it was to play with mix-and-match fashions.” Hirofumi Kurino, who began working in the fashion industry in 1977, is one of the original founders of select shops in Japan. As such, he had a major influence on the development of mixed styles. After joining the multilabel select shop Beams early in his career, Kurino and some of his colleagues at Beams started another multilabel store, United Arrows, in 1989. Kurino tells us that when the first select shops, such as Beams and United Arrows, were established they “became a major topic of conversation because these companies showed you what to wear and how to combine clothing in order to create a proposed style rather than just selling you some clothes. In other words, the mission of multilabel stores is to suggest an overall style rather than just to simply offer up merchandise.”
This shift in focus from brands to individual styling marks the beginnings of street-style culture, according to Kurino and Takano. Takano further attributes the movement toward styling rather than single-brand coordination to the children of the baby boomers beginning to take on a leading role in fashion: Rather than taking fashion inspiration from designers showcasing new styles on the runway or in fashion magazines, it became possible for anyone to experiment with different ways of wearing their own clothes and to go out on the streets of Harajuku or Shibuya to show off their styling creations.
One of the earliest styling techniques was layering, as people mixed and matched their DC brand clothes with more obscure brands or basics. Street-style culture developed, according to Takano, because “fashion styles were increasingly deconstructed and reformed.” In other words, people began to notice each other on the streets and take inspiration from the ways in which their fellow street stylists would interpret trends. As fashion became more egalitarian, more grassroots in terms of how new styles were created, select shops, led by pioneers such as Beams and United Arrows, were established to cater to the new demand for personal style that mixed brands, shapes, textures, etc., rather than the hyper-coordinated stylings determined by a single brand.
Takano tells us that experimentation with size and proportion in styling was also increasingly visible during the nineties, and this styling technique is still popular today. “For example, take sneakers. People began wearing larger sneakers on purpose and the trend took off. But this was not just a simple fashion statement. By adding volume to the feet, the legs appear more slender.” She says that people also tried to change the shape of their heads through styling. “People began to wear knitted hats and then took in the back of the hat, or attached something to the back of the head to add volume.” Takano suggests that playing with proportions like this is inspired by interactions with fashion overseas. “When it comes to our figures, Japanese people seem to look to body types of Americans and Europeans for comparison. So, I think that in order to create something approaching what many considered an ‘ideal figure,’ like Western fashion models, fashion coordination and styling techniques were developed that made use of various textiles, patterns, and methods of layering.”
— Hirofumi Kurino, senior adviser for creative direction, United Arrows
Contributed by Hanami Isogimi
Even in the midst of accelerating globalization and easy access to fashion information around the world, designers based in Tokyo maintain an originality that is unlike anywhere else. Their penchant for combining disparate elements is made possible by two things: a free spirit and precise attention to detail. These traits are in the DNA of Tokyo fashion, which has in turn influenced the rest of the world. Today we are seeing an increasing number of hybrid styles appearing in international collections. But this free-spirited yet precise approach to fashion was born and cultivated on the streets of Tokyo.
Staffer Chang’s fearless outfit is in keeping with Facetasm designer Hiromichi Ochiai's bold, experimental ethos.
Designers here don’t hesitate to combine concepts or items that were originally antithetical. This sort of distortion is fun and interesting for Tokyo’s street-style enthusiasts and is one of the most distinctive characteristics of Japanese fashion. One good example of how designers and fashion consumers revel in mixed, hybrid fashion is the popularity of the brand Facetasm. As the standard-bearer of mixed fashion, Hiromichi Ochiai of Facetasm is one of the most sought-after designers in Japan. Street- and high-fashion, casual and elegant, his style fuses elements that contradict one other. Facetasm has become popular across Japan and the brand’s presence overseas has been expanding recently.
Ochiai has often said that, being Japanese, he doesn’t feel taboos and constraints when it comes to designing clothes. He says he is free—that is, free from social and cultural expectations about how to dress, free from rules about what clothing is, free from conventional cuts, fabrics, gender classifications, and so on. Through this freedom, Ochiai believes he is able to express multifaceted beauty in his designs.
In addition, the everyday style in Tokyo reflects a precise attention to detail. For instance, foreign visitors to Japan often notice people carrying small square hand towels or handkerchiefs. These are used for blotting the face on hot days, or for drying hands after washing them, even if hand dryers are available. This seems like a small, ordinary detail, and no one thinks twice about carrying one. But in fact, it is a kind of small, personal luxury in public bathrooms, on public transportation, and in other public places to have a good-quality, soft hand towel to use. High-end products, such as Imabari towels, made in Japan with the finest cotton and craftsmanship, or towels made by luxury fashion brands are common, but the towel doesn’t have to be expensive to feel luxurious. It is this appreciation of and demand for small, personal luxuries of high quality that is a characteristic that many people in Tokyo, and indeed the rest of Japan, share. In terms of fashion, Japanese designers are extremely attuned to this demand, and so there is an emphasis on “made in Japan” quality and painstaking craftsmanship and construction.
We can see this attention to detail in brands like N.Hoolywood and Hyke, which are created by designers who are well versed in vintage clothing. These designers create clothes that, at a glance, look very simple, even though their cutting and material selections are distinctive. Design at beautiful people (this page) also expresses this view. The brand’s clothes are distinguished by their patterns, which are carefully developed to include subtle expressions of wit and humor. Although true fans enjoy discovering these in-jokes inscribed within the designs, many people who wear beautiful people clothes simply enjoy feeling the care and attention that so obviously goes into creating them, which, of course, they have come to expect from Tokyo designers.
Fashion journalist Hanami Isogimi first came across the street-photography magazine FRUiTS as a child and grew up with a passion for Harajuku street-style fashion. After graduating from university in 2006, Isogimi joined the largest Japanese fashion industry newspaper, Senken Shimbun/The Senken, and covers a wide range of fashion-related events and topics, including Fashion Week both in Tokyo and internationally.
Despite the popularity of mixed styles, one holdover from the DC brand boom in the 1980s is that there are many fashion-sensitive people in Tokyo who, when they feel an affinity with a designer’s philosophy, will make sure to buy clothes from that brand, even if the clothes are expensive or impractical. These people are known affectionately as “fashion maniacs” (see this page for more about “maniac” fashion and the brands they love). Brand enthusiasts invest in a favorite designer’s clothing as if they are buying artwork. As we’ll see in the following chapters, these maniacs, through their support of fledgling brands and fashion businesses, are making it possible for new designers and curators of select shops and concept stores to establish their brands and focus on design and innovation.
Kumiko Takano links the insatiable desire for fashion—and also the fragmentation of fashion into an ever-expanding array of style options—to the rise of fast fashion in the early 2000s, most notably through overseas brands like Zara, H&M, and Forever21 opening up in Japan. “Although the power of consumers in Japan was strong [in the nineties], fast fashion from manufacturers responding to the needs of today’s highly discerning fashion consumers has rapidly increased.” While DC brands may have dictated style to their followers a generation earlier, fast fashion brands have taken a more responsive, consumer-driven approach to producing their designs.
Although many stylish people enjoy the immediate, on-trend availability of fast fashion brands, others are pursuing different aspects of fashion and style as a way to differentiate themselves. Since Japanese consumers expect brands to produce fashion (and everything else) with a high level of quality and style, as Hanami Isogimi mentioned earlier (see this page), it’s hardly surprising that many discerning consumers would focus on finding high-quality vintage pieces, while others value traditional Japanese craftsmanship or are extremely particular about the materials and source of the clothes they wear. Still others look for a total lifestyle concept. Behind all of these pursuits is the desire for Japanese quality and the attention to detail that Isogimi discusses. Here, we’ll look at a number of influential brands that provide the highest levels of design and quality, shaping street style in the process.
Petite Robe Noire designer, Yoshiyo Abe, is often credited with bringing costume jewelry to the street styles worn by women in Tokyo. Before she launched a website selling vintage costume jewelry and later established her own jewelry brand Petite Robe Noire in 2009, costume jewelry was not something that women commonly included when styling their looks. The brand changed how women thought about costume jewelry to the extent that now it is a regular staple of both classic, elegant looks and sportier styles, playing on the deliberate mismatch between the jewelry and the clothes.
“It really makes sense to me to create jewelry by working in close proximity to all of the craftspeople and manufacturers involved in producing of my pieces,” she tells us when we meet at the Petite Robe Noire atelier. “And Tokyo has the kind of creative environment that is conducive to such collaborations. I want to keep pursuing the highest levels of craftsmanship, which is only possible here.”
Inside the Nishi-Azabu store, SIRI SIRI’s contemporary jewelry is on display. The distinctive designs, created by Naho Okamoto (above) are made using glass and rattan through traditional Japanese techniques. Okamoto’s pairing of a black Muji T-shirt with white JIL SANDER pants is an elegantly simple way to showcase her chic jewelry designs.
Inside the Petite Robe Noire showroom and atelier are designs that feature Yoshiyo Abe’s signature luminous cotton “pearls,” which are made by compressing cotton into beads and polishing them until they shine.
— Hiromichi Ochiai, designer, Facetasm
Another jewelry designer, SIRI SIRI designer Naho Okamoto, echoes this sentiment when talking about the creative possibilities here in Tokyo. “The more I go abroad, the more I am impressed with the level of freedom in Tokyo and the richness of the ways for expressing yourself. I want to keep creating jewelry as fashion in such environment—designs with the intensity of artworks, but that can also be used in everyday life.” Okamoto combines traditional Japanese techniques such as Edo kiriko (glassware) and Buddhist altar fixtures with contemporary designs, working with skilled craftspeople to create SIRI SIRI jewelry.
Many Tokyo clothing designers also prioritize both the provenance and processes by which the materials and fabrics they use are produced. For instance, Ryo Kashiwazaki, designer of the genderless brand Hender Scheme (see this page), tells us, “We value wit and humor in our designs, and strive to create clothes with solid craftsmanship.”
As fundamental as traditional Japanese methods and quality craftsmanship are to designers such as Abe, Okamoto, and Kashiwazaki, there also needs to be something more to create something truly unique. Tokyo’s most influential designers are, naturally, also obsessed with originality and finding new combinations in their designs.
Designer Hiromichi Ochiai of Facetasm is known for his skill at sublimating his wide-ranging knowledge of music, film, and art in an original way to create surprising, sophisticated clothes. Facetasm’s avant-garde designs blend street casual and luxury effortlessly and always top any list of Tokyo’s fashion musts. When we meet Ochiai at the Facetasm store in Harajuku, we talk about his influences. “When I was a teenager in 1990s Tokyo, there were many fashionable adults who wore many different fashion genres. I paid close attention to street culture in which the world’s fashions were mixed into Tokyo’s original style. I think that my own creations reflect the influence that particular time has had on me.”
The mixed styles and cross-genre influences from his youth are evident in the complex patterns and original textiles Ochiai’s designs are known for. “While making the most of the Japanese people’s excellent attention to detail,” Ochiai says, “we aim to pursue designs with originality to create something that is more than just ‘made in Japan.’” For Ochiai, the quality of manufacturing, and the brand’s customers’ demand for it, are a given. Building on that firm foundation of quality craftsmanship, Ochiai focuses on creating new possibilities for original designs without feeling constrained by cultural taboos surrounding Western-style clothes. This is a common refrain from the designers we spoke to and also directors of select shops and vintage stores, many of whom said they felt at liberty to collect, dismantle, and recombine various influences. With the whole world to choose from and a very Tokyo “why not?” attitude, Japanese designers and store directors, along with the people who wear their clothes and shop in their stores, have created some of the most original and eclectic collections in the world.
— Yoshikazu Yamagata, designer, writtenafterwards
Designer Yoshikazu Yamagata of the brand writtenafterwards has been called a maverick by the Japanese fashion media for his avant-garde creations, which are more like works of mixed-media art than clothing: disposable outfits for a single wear made of scrap materials like paper and plastics, headgear with motifs featuring rakes and globes, and other surreal experimentations. Yamagata’s designs are not so much to be worn in real life as to be displayed as art with the goal of evoking some kind of horror or fantasy. His clothes often have asymmetrical, organic silhouettes in vivid, hallucinatory colors and patterns, sometimes even with appendages growing out of them—a third or fourth arm or leg, one much longer than the other or pointing in odd directions, for example. As a designer, Yamagata is also not constrained by social trends and conventional wisdom. But what makes Yamagata’s creations special is how he links his designs to contemporary world culture and current events as well as to popular legends such as Japanese yokai monsters, hermits, and other fantasy archetypes. He is a designer who has maintained a rebellious spirit while at the same time keeping a close watch on what is current in fashion.
We asked Yamagata what makes style in Tokyo unique: “Because the Japanese have come into contact since childhood with various fashions that are not bound to a single country and culture, I think that the potential to create something new is high compared with people overseas. Recently, the ability to adopt outside influences—not only in everyday style but also in costuming and cosplay—has created so many variations in Japanese street style that you could say it’s the best in the world.”
After graduating from Central Saint Martins, Yamagata worked under John Galliano, whose own outrageous designs and modes of expression inspired Yamagata as a young designer. Yamagata is also a regular collaborator with the designer Mikio Sakabe with whom he published a book, Fashion wa maho (Fashion is Magical). Yamagata and Sakabe conceive of fashion as always evolving and ephemeral; it is like magic that appears and disappears in an instant, which is the central concept behind Yamagata’s unorthodox designs. (Sakabe’s own style is inspired by pop art and kawaii influences.)
But it was Yamagata’s designs for Comme des Garçons spring/summer 2014 that truly established his brand as a major force on the Tokyo street scene, among both Japan’s fashion media and his now-devoted fans. Talking about the experience of working with Rei Kawakubo, there is a sense of wonder and awe, the kind that a fashion student might have for a revered instructor: “I’ll never forget the charming expression on Rei Kawakubo’s face when she thanked me after we finished creating the collection.”
Yamagata’s constant innovation and rebellious spirit made him a natural protégé of Kawakubo, but also a role model for aspiring fashion designers. He tells us that, from working with Kawakubo, he learned “the ability to produce creations from abstract words. I also developed a more serious work ethic and attitude towards my designs." Yamagata has since taken the discipline and knowledge he gained from the collaboration with Kawakubo to mentor other younger designers.
Together with Sakabe, Yamagata opened the fashion school coconogacco. Under their tutelage, many of the school’s students were awarded prizes in the International Talent Support (ITS) fashion contest sponsored by Diesel. The success of writtenafterwards inspired him to spend a lot of time nurturing new talent through workshops, exhibitions, and fashion events to encourage them to develop their creative instincts and to go their own way, while also paying attention to what’s going on around them and taking inspiration from the wide variety of styles that can be seen on Tokyo’s streets.
At Kanda Myojin Shrine in the Sotokanda area, close to the brand’s atelier, staff member of writtenafterwards Kazue Nukui is wearing a red organdy blouse with embroidery, a palette-shaped clutch by writtenafterwards, and a skirt from the London brand Molly Goddard.
— Shoichi Aoki, editor in chief, STREET magazine
Having options—even when the number of options seems overwhelming—has made the street style we know today possible. Kumiko Takano from ACROSS recounts: “One day in 2008, a girl I spoke to while we were doing teitenkansoku told me that ‘fashion is like lunch.’ That really surprised me. But she explained that she thinks about fashion each day in the same way that she does when she decides what to eat at lunch: today will be Japanese food, tomorrow is Chinese, the next day Italian, and so on. When you think about it, it’s not really surprising or strange at all. If you were to search for street-style looks on the internet you could easily decide on Shibuya casual for today, Kogal style for tomorrow, and then Ura-Harajuku style and so on. Young people who think this way are on the rise.”
“On the other hand,” Takano continues, “a different girl told me that ‘fashion is a search for identity,’ and that is something I think I will remember for a long time.” While trying out a wide selection of style options does have its merits, most people we spoke to would agree that when you see someone with a clear sense of their own style, the effect is unmistakable. Mike Abelson says, “Popular trends come and go. But sometimes walking down the street, I’ll see someone who has his or her own distinct but really good sense of style. They might seem aware of what is happening at the moment but at the same time, they’re outside of the standard. I feel like there are quite a few people like that here in Tokyo.”
Fashion as identity, as a way to reveal something essential about a person’s nature, is an idea that Shoichi Aoki, founder and editor in chief of STREET magazine, has spent his career pursuing. “One of the reasons for publishing street-fashion photography is that by pursuing fashion we might end up revealing fundamental human traits,” Aoki explains. Taking a remarkably neutral approach to fashion photography, Aoki has tried to capture styles as they develop in the streets in order to make a permanent record of something that is always changing.
Just as specific trends come and go, the popularity of “street style” as a fashion story or a sub-genre of fashion photography waxes and wanes depending on the season, who is out and about, and what’s trending on social media. When we spoke with Scott Schuman, of The Sartorialist fame, he was optimistic: “People ask me if street style is dead. I don’t think it will ever die because people will always love looking at people.”
We couldn’t agree more. Walking down Omotesando’s famous treelined boulevard and seeing everyone dressed up with obvious intention in so many different styles, it’s hard not to get caught up in the performance. Our motivation for creating this book, for photographing and interviewing people whose influence can be seen in magazines, advertising, exhibitions, and other venues throughout Tokyo, is contribute to the conversation and create a lasting record of a significant cultural movement.
Style practiced in Tokyo has a relevance that extends far beyond the city limits. The themes we’ve introduced in this chapter and continue to explore throughout the book—finding inspiration everywhere, combining pieces in unique ways, paying careful attention to craftsmanship, passionately pursuing great style as an expression of self—are shaping fashion worldwide. They are compelling concepts no matter where you live.
In a printed book, we have to admit that the latest trends will always be beyond the format. But as we’ll see in the next chapter, what makes someone stylish transcends trends and the season’s collections.
