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JAPANESE STREETS celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. We might have been shooting Japanese street fashion for ten years now, but it never ends. Harajuku’s fashion trends come and go, and just never cease to surprise. And so it was this year.

It is impossible to cover all the popular trends of 2012, but we have selected some of the ones that we liked best. First and foremost:

STOCKINGS

Japanese stockings and tights took a wonderful flight of fancy this year. Since AVANTGARDE opened its doors in Harajuku last year, plain tights and stockings just won’t do anymore. From tattoo tights to print stockings, here are some very adventurous legs (click on the photos to see the full shoot):

PLATFORM SHOES

Vivienne Westwood’s Rocking Horse Ballerina’s have captured the hearts of Japanese fashion lovers ever since they came out in 1985. They won’t die. The past few years we have seen more and more shoes inspired by these iconic clogs. This year they seemed even more ubiquitous than before.

PANNIER SKIRTS

Perhaps inspired by the popularity of Rocking Horse Ballerina’s, we saw an endless parade of pannier skirts this year. Playful, colorful, cute. I hope we will see them again next year!

CREEPERS

George Cox is deeply loved in Japan and George Cox Creepers, as well as imitations of them, thoroughly crept into the Harajuku fashion scene this year.

PLATFORM SNEAKERS

For a few years, platform shoes seemed to have lost a lot of their popularity, but this year they came back with a vengeance. The most popular of them all, platform sneakers, specially made by small companies that purchase well-known brands like Converse and give them some extra height. With all that extra height, sneaking in becomes quite a challenge. Perhaps time to rename them?

ANIMALS

We thought that it was mostly girls carrying stuffed animals around, but when we had a better look we found animals everywhere: bags, shoes, accessories, and so on. And not just the ever popular bears, rabbits and panda’s, but even a shark and octopus.

Not all animals we found were of the cute stuffed cuddly plush toy kind. We even found a real spider specimen:

KNIT CAP

One of the more remarkable trends of this year was the knit cap worn during Japan’s hottest summer months, usually in bright neon colors. Strangely enough, now that temperatures are nearing freezing point we don’t see them anymore… (Not all of these images are linked.)