Japanese Street Style #1
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oceanharlot
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it kinda looks like a wig 
love those shoes though
love those shoes though
My brother saw this picture and said "That´s J.Lo only Chinese"Originally posted by Bixii+Jan 6th, 2004 - 4:13 am--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Bixii @ Jan 6th, 2004 - 4:13 am)</div><div class='quotemain'> <!--QuoteBegin-unismuimui@Jan 5th, 2004 - 7:34 pm
hahahahahahaha [/b][/quote]
yeah they do try very hard to get the looks of J.Lo, Britney and some other western celebs, it's also part of their fashion.
smashinfashion
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yeah they do try very hard to get the looks of J.Lo, Britney and some other western celebs, it's also part of their fashion. [/b][/quote]Originally posted by MissPurple+Jan 6th, 2004 - 1:28 pm--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(MissPurple @ Jan 6th, 2004 - 1:28 pm)</div><div class='quotemain'>@Jan 5th, 2004 - 7:34 pm
My brother saw this picture and said "That´s J.Lo only Chinese"
hahahahahahaha
she is a kogaru- they are girls who tan a lot and dye their hair. they used to wear really tall platforms and wear extreme makeup but that is passe, in fact kogaru culture is pretty passe now but theres still some who keep it going.
social*butterfly
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Japanese street style is way too busy for me, but I congratulate them for being so daring to wear these outfits.
smashinfashion
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i agree about the longer lines and less emphasis on showing off curves like the u.s. does. i like the longer look, its more flattering on my boyish body and its more elegant and poetic than in your face skintight gear.
purplelucrezia
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Thanks oceanharlot! 
I really love the coats from the first link...
I really love the coats from the first link... purplelucrezia
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I found this cutely dark outfit on one of oceanharlot's recommended sites... 
smashinfashion
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I thought they were called "ganguro." I believe kogaru go for the schoolgirl look along with their tan and dyed hair. [/b][/quote]
yeah your right they're similar. ganguro where the ones who were more extreme and were often affiliated with the sex industry. ganguro translates into "black face" or "black skin" i cant remember exactly. the kogaru were more cutesy.
oceanharlot
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wowzas... I'm kinda scared of all these different deliniations of one genre of fashion...
purplelucrezia
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© New York Times May 23, 2000
Tokyo Street Fashion Arrives, Bowing to No Horizon
By GUY TREBAY
The ganguro (dark face) girls were out in force -- faces tanned the color of football pigskin, eyes ringed with stark white panda makeup, and hair, as a bystander put it, "dried, fried and blown to the side." The yamanba were also well represented, women fashioned after a Japanese folk figure whose name translates roughly as "monster mountain woman." Followers of the trend toward ladylike dressing, take note.
Undeterred by a violent thunderstorm whipping off the Hudson, a thousand or so fashion compulsives hustled themselves to Chelsea last week for Tokyo Street 2000 -- a roadshow of contemporary photography, art and fashion meant to introduce New York to some of the less publicized byways of Japanese design.
The cognoscenti are familiar with Tokyo street style -- its loopy blend of pop cultural references, label mania, cartoon iconography and overall appetite for the cultural flotsam of the West. You can barely avoid it in downtown Manhattan, at Japanese-stocked stores like Air Market and Hotel Venus, and at clubs and bars around Little Tokyo, as East Ninth Street is sometimes called.
For that matter, you can't escape it in the fashion press, where imitation is always the sincerest form of self-promotion. Steven Meisel's May picture spread in Italian Vogue, for instance, showing slacker models in scurvy rock T-shirts, could have appeared in any issue of the mass-market Japanese girls' magazine Cutie. The unabashed consumerism of Vogue's popular Index feature seems right out of Cutie's sister book, Spring. And Lucky, the hip shopping glossy introduced last week by Condé Nast, was "very inspired" by Japanese magazines, with their pages of street shots and shoes, said Kim France, Lucky's editor in chief.
"One of the things James Truman and I bonded over from the start was loving those magazines," Ms. France said, referring to Condé Nast's editorial director. "They're very user's manual. They're very egalitarian. They're very proto-Internet."
It's no accident, then, that Takarajima-sha, which publishes Cutie and Spring and sponsored Tokyo Street 2000, chose this moment for the two-day trade extravaganza, in hopes of alerting New Yorkers to the fact that there are actual designers behind the styles that they've been . . . adapting. If the clothes the sponsor brought along were a trifle cautious, that didn't stop the audience from turning out in what amounts to the real thing: Harajuku style.
Harajuku, a train terminal next to the upscale neighborhood of Shibuya and a bosky shrine to the Meiji imperium, is Tokyo style's grand promenade. On a given Saturday, the area and a nearby shopping complex called Laforet are thronged with Tokyo's young, disporting themselves in the regalia of a generation for whom pop culture is mother's milk.
The Harajuku style takes an Osterizer approach to dressing, randomly consuming historic design references the same hungry way a D.J. might sample music. The result is a scene in which neo-Goths parade cheek by jowl with Superfly pimps, where Roy Orbison look-alikes wear Hello Kitty, where Elvis can be spotted in a Snoopy T-shirt, and where young women outfitted as naughty schoolgirls accessorize themselves with theatrically bloodied bandages and Kabuki wigs.
For years, what most Westerners knew about Japanese fashion derived mainly from runway reports on a handful of austere deconstructionists. "People only know, like, three designers -- Issey Miyaki, Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto," said Yuko Arakawa, who produced Tokyo Street 2000. "It's a little bit boring." It's also barely a fraction of the overall story.
Tokyo street style, Ms. Arakawa said, is not really so much a fashion as a gestalt. "There's so much variety, it's almost chaotic," added Robb Young, a fashion writer for aRude magazine. "What's great about that mixing of styles is that it lacks pretension. There's no coordinated or uncoordinated." What's difficult for most Westerners to comprehend "is that it's not a manifestation of a life style," he said.
"In the West you'd have preconceptions about people dressed in punk or rockabilly or post-Gothic or teen idol clothes," Mr. Young said. "In Japan, you can't make those assumptions about the person behind the costume."
In Tokyo, it all goes into the fashion blender. That doesn't mean those who wear it are indifferent to the statement they're making. "There are not many other opportunities for people to express themselves in what is, after all, this very unified, very conformist state," Maiko Seki, a Tokyo fashion publicist, said as Tokyo Street 2000 began. "So clothing may be one of the ways for people to present themselves as individuals."
But it's not the individual presentations so much as the mass effusion of Tokyo style that makes it irresistible. "The way they throw themselves into trends, and the attention to detail, is unreal," said Laura Wills, whose Manhattan clothing shop, Screaming Mimi's, operates a branch in Tokyo. Japan's urban young are "the most creative dressers in the world," Ms. Wills said.
"They process trends at the speed of light," she said. "One month it's metallic clothes, high gold shoes and anything glitter. The next month everyone's wearing Joan Jett T-shirts." The Tokyo craze of this particular instant, she noted, is Michael Jackson, "especially anything from the white-glove era."
Sure enough, a white glove was spotted at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, where Tokyo Street 2000 took place, amid the monster platform shoes, the shredded Tommy Hilfiger jogging shells, and the Afros, dreadlocks and cornrows that are offered as a homage to Jamaican dance hall music and American rap by Japanese fans known as pigeon heads. And while the ganguro style of wearing dark makeup could easily be read as racist, the image also takes inspiration from Japanese fairy tale figures and comments on the orangey dermal effects of tanning beds.
"It's all wonderfully absurd," said Kim Hastreiter, editor in chief of Paper magazine, which was among the first American magazines to embrace Harajuku style labels like Virus, Hysteric Clamor, Hotel Venus and A Bathing Ape. "The Japanese kids have this nutty take on culture," she added. "They think in this cartoon kind of way."
Yet for all its apparent influence, Japanese street style has so far failed to penetrate the American retail market, largely because of high labor costs and because its designers remain obscure. Once a major producer of apparel for the United States market, Japan now accounts for less than 1 percent of overall apparel imports.
"Up until now we've been able to live without exporting," explained John H. Miura, a fashion business consultant. "We're our own largest market, the No. 2 market in the world. But the situation has been so tough in Japan that manufacturers are looking outward. The problem is that Americans only know the Issey Miyakes and Rei Kawakubos. There are a lot of designers making beautiful clothes, and the quality is very high."
So is the cost. "It can be as much as 30 percent over American prices," Mr. Miura conceded. Which is why Japan's contribution to dressing the American colossus amounts, as an official in the Commerce Department recently put it, to little more than a Hello Kitty bag.
Thus the mission of Tokyo Street 2000, whose runway show, set against a backdrop of speedy videos with a voice-over intoning nonsense phrases in fractured English, may not have broken design ground, but it did succeed in surveying some popular Harajuku trends: glitter stickers, appliquéd knee-high stockings, Lurex, ruched stand-away waists on skirts, ratted French twists, ribboned fabric, hemlines suited to the convent and that fashion imperishable, acid-dyed denim.
What really mattered was the audience, which had teetered through a torrential downpour to pose in its most outlandish finery. "What you've got to understand," Koji Yoshida, the curator of the fair's art exhibition, said as a woman walked by with a toy robot on a leash, "is that, in the West, dressing is seen as a necessity, whereas in Japan, it has another level. It's primarily a game."
Tokyo Street Fashion Arrives, Bowing to No Horizon
By GUY TREBAY
The ganguro (dark face) girls were out in force -- faces tanned the color of football pigskin, eyes ringed with stark white panda makeup, and hair, as a bystander put it, "dried, fried and blown to the side." The yamanba were also well represented, women fashioned after a Japanese folk figure whose name translates roughly as "monster mountain woman." Followers of the trend toward ladylike dressing, take note.
Undeterred by a violent thunderstorm whipping off the Hudson, a thousand or so fashion compulsives hustled themselves to Chelsea last week for Tokyo Street 2000 -- a roadshow of contemporary photography, art and fashion meant to introduce New York to some of the less publicized byways of Japanese design.
The cognoscenti are familiar with Tokyo street style -- its loopy blend of pop cultural references, label mania, cartoon iconography and overall appetite for the cultural flotsam of the West. You can barely avoid it in downtown Manhattan, at Japanese-stocked stores like Air Market and Hotel Venus, and at clubs and bars around Little Tokyo, as East Ninth Street is sometimes called.
For that matter, you can't escape it in the fashion press, where imitation is always the sincerest form of self-promotion. Steven Meisel's May picture spread in Italian Vogue, for instance, showing slacker models in scurvy rock T-shirts, could have appeared in any issue of the mass-market Japanese girls' magazine Cutie. The unabashed consumerism of Vogue's popular Index feature seems right out of Cutie's sister book, Spring. And Lucky, the hip shopping glossy introduced last week by Condé Nast, was "very inspired" by Japanese magazines, with their pages of street shots and shoes, said Kim France, Lucky's editor in chief.
"One of the things James Truman and I bonded over from the start was loving those magazines," Ms. France said, referring to Condé Nast's editorial director. "They're very user's manual. They're very egalitarian. They're very proto-Internet."
It's no accident, then, that Takarajima-sha, which publishes Cutie and Spring and sponsored Tokyo Street 2000, chose this moment for the two-day trade extravaganza, in hopes of alerting New Yorkers to the fact that there are actual designers behind the styles that they've been . . . adapting. If the clothes the sponsor brought along were a trifle cautious, that didn't stop the audience from turning out in what amounts to the real thing: Harajuku style.
Harajuku, a train terminal next to the upscale neighborhood of Shibuya and a bosky shrine to the Meiji imperium, is Tokyo style's grand promenade. On a given Saturday, the area and a nearby shopping complex called Laforet are thronged with Tokyo's young, disporting themselves in the regalia of a generation for whom pop culture is mother's milk.
The Harajuku style takes an Osterizer approach to dressing, randomly consuming historic design references the same hungry way a D.J. might sample music. The result is a scene in which neo-Goths parade cheek by jowl with Superfly pimps, where Roy Orbison look-alikes wear Hello Kitty, where Elvis can be spotted in a Snoopy T-shirt, and where young women outfitted as naughty schoolgirls accessorize themselves with theatrically bloodied bandages and Kabuki wigs.
For years, what most Westerners knew about Japanese fashion derived mainly from runway reports on a handful of austere deconstructionists. "People only know, like, three designers -- Issey Miyaki, Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto," said Yuko Arakawa, who produced Tokyo Street 2000. "It's a little bit boring." It's also barely a fraction of the overall story.
Tokyo street style, Ms. Arakawa said, is not really so much a fashion as a gestalt. "There's so much variety, it's almost chaotic," added Robb Young, a fashion writer for aRude magazine. "What's great about that mixing of styles is that it lacks pretension. There's no coordinated or uncoordinated." What's difficult for most Westerners to comprehend "is that it's not a manifestation of a life style," he said.
"In the West you'd have preconceptions about people dressed in punk or rockabilly or post-Gothic or teen idol clothes," Mr. Young said. "In Japan, you can't make those assumptions about the person behind the costume."
In Tokyo, it all goes into the fashion blender. That doesn't mean those who wear it are indifferent to the statement they're making. "There are not many other opportunities for people to express themselves in what is, after all, this very unified, very conformist state," Maiko Seki, a Tokyo fashion publicist, said as Tokyo Street 2000 began. "So clothing may be one of the ways for people to present themselves as individuals."
But it's not the individual presentations so much as the mass effusion of Tokyo style that makes it irresistible. "The way they throw themselves into trends, and the attention to detail, is unreal," said Laura Wills, whose Manhattan clothing shop, Screaming Mimi's, operates a branch in Tokyo. Japan's urban young are "the most creative dressers in the world," Ms. Wills said.
"They process trends at the speed of light," she said. "One month it's metallic clothes, high gold shoes and anything glitter. The next month everyone's wearing Joan Jett T-shirts." The Tokyo craze of this particular instant, she noted, is Michael Jackson, "especially anything from the white-glove era."
Sure enough, a white glove was spotted at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, where Tokyo Street 2000 took place, amid the monster platform shoes, the shredded Tommy Hilfiger jogging shells, and the Afros, dreadlocks and cornrows that are offered as a homage to Jamaican dance hall music and American rap by Japanese fans known as pigeon heads. And while the ganguro style of wearing dark makeup could easily be read as racist, the image also takes inspiration from Japanese fairy tale figures and comments on the orangey dermal effects of tanning beds.
"It's all wonderfully absurd," said Kim Hastreiter, editor in chief of Paper magazine, which was among the first American magazines to embrace Harajuku style labels like Virus, Hysteric Clamor, Hotel Venus and A Bathing Ape. "The Japanese kids have this nutty take on culture," she added. "They think in this cartoon kind of way."
Yet for all its apparent influence, Japanese street style has so far failed to penetrate the American retail market, largely because of high labor costs and because its designers remain obscure. Once a major producer of apparel for the United States market, Japan now accounts for less than 1 percent of overall apparel imports.
"Up until now we've been able to live without exporting," explained John H. Miura, a fashion business consultant. "We're our own largest market, the No. 2 market in the world. But the situation has been so tough in Japan that manufacturers are looking outward. The problem is that Americans only know the Issey Miyakes and Rei Kawakubos. There are a lot of designers making beautiful clothes, and the quality is very high."
So is the cost. "It can be as much as 30 percent over American prices," Mr. Miura conceded. Which is why Japan's contribution to dressing the American colossus amounts, as an official in the Commerce Department recently put it, to little more than a Hello Kitty bag.
Thus the mission of Tokyo Street 2000, whose runway show, set against a backdrop of speedy videos with a voice-over intoning nonsense phrases in fractured English, may not have broken design ground, but it did succeed in surveying some popular Harajuku trends: glitter stickers, appliquéd knee-high stockings, Lurex, ruched stand-away waists on skirts, ratted French twists, ribboned fabric, hemlines suited to the convent and that fashion imperishable, acid-dyed denim.
What really mattered was the audience, which had teetered through a torrential downpour to pose in its most outlandish finery. "What you've got to understand," Koji Yoshida, the curator of the fair's art exhibition, said as a woman walked by with a toy robot on a leash, "is that, in the West, dressing is seen as a necessity, whereas in Japan, it has another level. It's primarily a game."
purplelucrezia
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Some more extreme examples... 
purplelucrezia
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purplelucrezia
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Someone's cute avatar from another site...
smashinfashion
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good story purple
purplelucrezia
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I thought it might help to explain some of the various types of Japanese style... 
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