Japan Fashion Now!

The “Japan Fashion Now!” exhibit at the Museum at FIT opens with a room of rather drab suits and dresses – the high fashion runway designs of the 1980s that, apparently, were *huge* in their time and put Japanese fashion on the map.

The room is poorly lit, perhaps with the intention of being “dramatic”, but seeming to me merely gloomy, and just as dungeon-like as when they held a Goth exhibit here and intentionally aimed to create a dungeon atmosphere.

Fortunately, it opens up in the next room, which is much more colorful and more brightly lit. It makes a serious impact as soon as you walk in, the walls covered in images of the skyscrapers of Tokyo. I might have recognized certain buildings if I looked closely, but missed the fact that they were tying certain neighborhoods to certain styles and trends – Akiba for cosplay, Shibuya for girls’ street fashion, Ginza for men’s high fashion. It is in any case a beautiful installation, and I wish I could have taken photos to share with you.

The exhibition contained a great range of wonderful pieces illustrating just about as broad a range as one could hope for of Japanese street fashions. There were goth-lolita pieces donated by my friend / former coworker Kristen Sollee (incl. pieces by h.NAOTO, Baby the Stars Shine Bright, and Alice Auaa), black with tons of buckles and ties, a motif of crosses printed onto the garments, and spiderwebs…

You can see Kristen, who works for Japan Society, and her coverage of the exhibit in this official Japan Society / Nihon New York segment:

More videos relating to the exhibit can be found at the Museum at FIT official YouTube channel.

The band hANGRY & ANGRY, above, who I must admit I had never heard of, donated or loaned outfits they wore onstage, mixing punk and goth-loli, black with bright electric blues and pinks, the hard, tough, dark goth-punk look with super cute, yet somewhat creepy, goth-punk teddy bears. The word “kowa kawaii,” literally something like “scary cute,” which I had never heard used before as an explicit term, came up in the Yoshitomo Nara exhibit which I saw later in the day, and I think it fits really well here.

The exhibit also featured bôsôzoku (“speed tribes”) outfits, the tough-guy boots and military slacks and shirts, and extensively embroidered long coats of Japan’s biker gangs. A huge deal in the 1980s-90s, I get the impression they’ve declined these days, but the fashion is still really something. Eschewing the leather jackets of American biker gangs, the bôsôzoku wore coats that went down below their ankles, embroidered with majorly tough guy images (such as tigers) and nationalistic, militaristic or just plain tough phrases, as well as their names, gang names, position (such as “gang leader”), and the like. Their helmets and bikes are no less interesting, and the groups would go so far as to fly large flags from the backs of their bikes too.

School uniforms are tucked away in a corner – though hardly anything that their wearers invented or experiment with, hardly anything that should be considered “fashion” in the sense of something new or trendy, these uniforms are certainly everpresent in Japan, and in Japanese youth culture. I myself considered for awhile trying to get my hands on one of those black boys’ uniforms with the gold buttons and high collars. I thought it’d look cool, as a sort of cosplay meets Japanese fashion sort of thing. But, alas, they are really quite expensive, and besides, I’d actually probably look more or less pretty ridiculous in it, whether in Japan or in the US.

Though the curator explicitly says it doesn’t count as fashion (why not?), the show also includes a few marvelously well-done examples of cosplay costumes, including a pink catgirl maid costume, one of Tycho Science (who I’d never heard of, but which makes for a cool costume), and an excellent costume of Oscar from The Rose of Versailles. (Wish I could have taken a picture of this for you; I was most pleasantly surprised to see it!)

Pieces from formal fashion designer Issey Miyake included several outfits (whole outfits, down to the shoes!) covered in bright colored prints of designs by Murakami Takashi – one a huge, baggy blue raincoat, very street style, and another, a men’s outfit in green, also very baggy, reminding me of a street tough/thug/gangster sort of style, pants hanging down, underwear showing sort of thing. Next to these was a more subdued, beautiful elegant dress in a light blue, patterned after Aya Takano’s piece “Moon.” (Something like this but not quite.)

The use of video screens to display the section text was an interesting choice, but ultimately, somehow, it just didn’t work for me. I can’t put my finger on quite why, but I really would have preferred to see regular printed labels. As it was, the printed labels only covered collections database-style data – materials, year, etc. – with no explanation whatsoever of each sub-culture, description of themes or motifs or inspirations.

Inevitably, the exhibit lacks the dynamism of actually walking the streets of Tokyo, seeing people moving and interacting and living their lives in these fashions. But, given the limitations inherent in staging an exhibition rather than a walking tour of Tokyo, I think this exhibition represents more or less the best one could possibly expect. It’s colorful, bright, dynamic [to an extent], and diverse, reflecting not just high fashion and not just those certain things most widely talked about, e.g. goth-loli, but actually a rather wide swath of elements or aspects of the Japanese fashion scene. I wonder how these works would have functioned as a runway show. In motion, on real people, but still artificially elevated from street fashion to a high fashion context…. Hm…

Japan Fashion Now! is up through April 2, at the Museum at FIT, Seventh Avenue at 27th St., New York NY

Read Full Post »

NYT: Japan’s Fashions, Among the Hippest, Little Known Elsewhere

Tokyo absolutely is one of the world’s major fashion centers. All one has to do to understand and appreciate this is take a walk around Shibuya, Harajuku, or Shimo-Kitazawa with eyes to the youth street fashions, creative, innovative, sometimes bizarre in the extreme, which have for decades played a major role in influencing fashions around the world. Though it is difficult for an individual like myself to know where a fashion trend begins and where it moves to, I can say from direct experience that, coming home to NY in 2008 after a year in Yokohama/Tokyo, I was struck by what I saw on the streets of New York, emulating or echoing that of Tokyo. Suddenly vests, slim ties, and hats (fedoras? is that the right word?) were all the rage. Young men in New York were suddenly wearing layers of thin shirts with low V-necks, as they had been doing in Tokyo for years. How exactly did this come to New York? I don’t know. I don’t think the average guy on the street in New York is reading Japanese fashion magazines.

It is clear that Japanese fashion – and other aspects of pop culture – have been gaining steam, at least among a niche market, in the West. German bands such as Tokio Hotel and Cinema Bizarre exemplify the conscious & intentional adoption of the fashion styles of the visual kei J-rockers. A maid cafe has opened in LA; Harajuku-style goth-punk boutiques have popped up here and there in major cities, books like the Gothic & Lolita Bible began to be published in English, and are available alongside a multitude of other fashion books & magazines at places like the Kinokuniya in New York. The Jonas Brothers may not have had their eye on Kimura Takuya, but they were certainly dressing like him.

Japanese fashion has been inspiring runway fashion in the West as well, for decades. But, as a brief article in the New York Times today explains, Japanese fashion designers, fragmented and focused upon the domestic market, have hardly participated, nor benefited financially, from the global appreciation of Japanese fashion and the great power it holds.

All of this I know. But the article more explicitly explains how Western fashion designers travel to Tokyo (or send agents in their place), buy up garments, and take them home to be reverse engineered. Resized, resewn, altered, adapted and adopted, with little if any attribution to the original Japanese designer, and certainly very little financial benefit to the Japanese designers, whose work is truly fueling the West’s fashion industry. I for one had not fully appreciated the extent to which this process truly is a parasitic feeding off of the Japanese fashion world, at no benefit to the Japanese designers.

It seems to me a typical story, though. It is not just in fashion that Japanese companies focus almost exclusively on the domestic market. It may seem stupid to commentators in the West, and perhaps it is, financially, for Japanese designers to focus so exclusively on the domestic market. If Japanese fashion companies opened boutiques in the major cities of the West and marketed their clothes there; if Japanese cellphone handsets were available in the West; they could make a fortune, while at the same time doing something really incredible for Western culture/society. But that’s a huge part of what makes Japan so interesting and so special. The fact that Japan is less connected into a true sense of “internationalization” than the major countries of the West – which exchange people and culture so readily that it’s amazing we even still have distinct cultures – is a huge factor in what helps it maintain its distinctive identity in nearly every aspect of contemporary & pop culture (even though traditional culture continues to take a beating, though that’s a separate matter…).

I must admit – and perhaps this is somewhat selfish – I rather prefer that things are they way they are. So long as Japanese companies continue to focus on the domestic market, the experience (as a foreigner) of living in Japan, of being connected to Japanese fashions and other trends, will remain something special, something enviable, something attainable in the West only as part of a semi-exclusive subcultural niche. If, god forbid, it should go mainstream, as, for example, Evisu jeans and Bathing Ape have, it ceases to be “Japanese”, becomes “American street”, takes on new connotations, and loses its appeal to (some of) those of us with an eye for the obscure, exotic, niche pop culture of Japan.

Read Full Post »