Girl's Style

If you ever visited a Japanese bookstore you are familiar with the rows and rows of fashion magazines. The most interesting ones are without doubt the ones that follow street fashion.

By Kjeld Duits, Friday November 1, 2002 - news

Girl’s Style documents the street fashion trends of the Kansai area, the Western Japanese triangle covering Kobe, Osaka, and Kyoto.

Girl’s Style is published just four times a year, and targets young women between 15 and 22 years old. It is a fairly small magazine of about 180,000 copies a run. But in spite of its small size and its youth (it was started earlier this year), it has a fairly large impact. If you live in the Kansai, are female and want to be up-to-date this is one mag you don’t want to miss.

Editor Shigeru Kita explains how they select the people they feature in their magazine: “We look at how much fun they seem to have with their clothes. Casual is the keyword, but the clothes have to radiate fun with a capital F.” Most clothes in Girl’s Style are playful, but far removed from Fruits‘ avant-garde style. These are the kind of clothes you can wear when you visit your boyfriend’s parents.

Many Japanese street fashion magazines try to widen their appeal by covering clubs, concerts, events, and art events. Not Girl’s Style. This is 100% pure fashion. It consists almost completely of head-to-toe shots of people showing off their own clothes. Not in tiny thumbnail photos, but easy-on-the-eye big ones. Some of the shots cover a whole page, many other pages hold four. Just as on JAPANESE STREETS, brands and prices (as well as age and occupation) are given. If you don’t read Japanese, you are out of luck. All descriptions are exclusively in Japanese. The excellent and clear photographs make up for that many times over though.

Besides clearly showing the latest trends on Kansai’s city streets, Girl’s Style also tells you where you can buy the gear. Each issue covers dozens of shops, with lots of photographs, and—this is really cool—the shop assistants modeling the stuff they sell. Mind you, these articles are not disguised advertisements as is usually the case with these kind of magazines. The publisher keeps a pretty large detachment of stylists and editors at hand who go out searching for cool and trendy places. If it is in Girl’s Style you can be sure it is worth a visit. And if you are directionally-challenged, amazingly well-crafted maps help you on your way.

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