Seeing how thoroughly Western fashion has permeated Japanese society, it is sobering to realize how brief its history actually is in this country. Western fashion entered Japan some 150 years ago, but the majority of Japanese women continued to wear kimono well into the first half of the 20th century. It took until the sixties before Western fashion truly took off. Which means that it reaches back only about half a century.
In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, fashion plays an incredibly important role in the lives of many Japanese. A surprisingly large number of people in their late teens and early twenties spend as much as 50 to 90 percent of their disposable income on clothing.
Fashion to them is a way of life. Instead of watching TV, doing sports, exploring the outdoors, or taking a trip in their free time, they prefer to go shopping for clothes.
This becomes immediately obvious when you visit areas like Tokyo’s famous Ginza boulevard, or the city’s youth culture areas of Harajuku and Shibuya. Both are crowded all day long, every single day of the week. On the week-end, they are so busy you can often only shuffle.
Ginza Boulevard
The number of fashion related businesses in these areas is mind boggling. In Shibuya’s famous Shibuya 109 fashion building there are over a hundred shops on 10 floors. In nearby Harajuku, the even more famous Laforet Harajuku building features more than 140 shops on 12 floors. Nearby Omotesando Hills, an upscale shopping mall, houses about a hundred retail outlets. These are just three of countless buildings like this, spread out all over this mega-city.
Shibuya 109
Omotesando Hills
Surrounded by this enormous wealth of fashion, Japanese have begun to explore and experiment. Unfettered by hundreds of years of fashion convention, they mix and match, and freely combine styles, materials and influences.
This first got the West’s attention in the 1980s when designers Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto took to the catwalks of Paris. Their unconventional designs both shocked and inspired. Western fashion had never seen anything like it. They introduced concepts like simplicity, asymmetry and deconstruction, and they showed that black could be beautiful. Their eventual recognition and success captured the nation they hailed from.
These days, new fashion ideas are more likely to come from the streets than from the catwalk. Especially Osaka’s Amerika Mura and Tokyo’s Harajuku, both youth culture centers, have become famous for giving birth to a seemingly endless chain of new fashion trends. Some of these have taken new paths, like lolita fashion and Dolly Kei. Others have been more subtle.
Harajuku fashion
Harajuku fashion
All of these trends have one thing in common, the deep love of layering, unbelievable attention to detail, and an astonishing creativity in combining colors and materials. Undoubtedly a leftover from a time, not so long ago, when everybody wore kimono.
Kimono and modern dresses in the 1920s
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