As the crowd sat waiting in Yebisu Garden Hall for the start of N. Hoolywood’s AW ‘09-’10 show “Skyscraper,” a pleasant female narrator from a books-on-tape version of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead mumbled text over a minimalist early techno loop. These were not mere English morphemes meant to subtly introduce the collection’s 1940s NYC architectural theme, we soon learned; Designer Daisuke Obana was dead serious about the message. As the models filed out, the novel’s lead character Howard Roark ranted at the audience over early Kraftwerk about individualism, personal creation, and the tyranny of tradition. The clothes, thankfully, bore out the oppositional ideas being spewed.

The collection generally dug deep into a lost legion of ’40s New York styles. The models looked like American “Greatest Generation” teens in the years before they enlisted — “wet” hair sliced with staggeringly linear side-parts. Howard Hughes-style up-turned lambswool collars came on multiple coats. Almost all the suits were double-breasted, with the most innovative model buttoning only at the top and then cutting away in acute angles below.

While many stylistic elements came from recreations of period dress, more abstract ’40s motifs also played a big part. Super-high turtlenecks reached to the chin just as the Empire State Building reaches to the stars. Patterns dabbled in Art Deco and Op Art. Obana may have found his inspiration in old photographs, as he totally avoided color, other than the chance line of red in an overwhelming sea of black, white, grey, washed-out purple, and taupe.

The Roark-worthy innovation however, came in the silhouette, which was bulky to the point of being scandalous. The pieces imagined strong-shouldered robots wandering out of Metropolis, born from an inverted-triangular stylized representation of the male brute. The pants were baggy, often pleated to an Old Folks’ Home level of relaxation. From the viewpoint of the Tokyo hipster crowd, the clothes did not appear to fit the rail-thin Japanese boys very well. But this was Obana firing a round straight into the heart of the over-skinny paradigm that has guided Tokyo streets for the last decade. Obana may have built his success on the ultra-slim aesthetic, but he is apparently now hoping to tear down this past to build for the future.

Playing around with borderline uncool is now Obana’s modus operandi. N. Hoolywood is constantly attempting to re-use retro styles that feel vaguely uncomfortable and aesthetically-suspect. Last season, Obana did it with the Amish, and before that, he made Harvey Pekar into a style role-model. Obana’s raison d’être is apparently resurrecting forgotten styles that exist legions beyond our current tastes — saying to all the fashion editors and buyers in attendance with a Howard Roark-ian unwillingness to compromise, “I don’t care what you think. This is how I shall do it!” On the way out, an editor of a leading fashion title said to me, “I didn’t see anything that I would wear myself,” but that may be the point. N. Hoolywood manages to hit the top of the “Cool Tokyo Brands” charts year after year by producing items that are somehow so painfully square they are painfully hip. He designs; you figure out how in the world you would wear it.

Of course, the post-modern irony is that Obana is not really Roark at all. He is no Modernist fighting against Classicism, but a Retro Archivist fighting against the Contemporary. Regardless, Obana gave us a lot to chew on, and this collection may have been his most daring leap to date from from the safe vintage collector/street fashion world into the more foreboding realm of being a capital-D designer. The obsession with Art Deco and classic ’40s maître d’ style inherently made everything more upscale and formal, but with its slightly-Objectivist conceptual punch, N. Hoolywood showed it had the kind of big-picture cultural philosophy worthy of a leading fashion brand.

At the time of its initial establishment in 2005, Tokyo Girls Collection (TGC) offered a revolutionary alternative to the standard industry “fashion show.” E-commerce company Xavel (now Branding Inc.) founded TGC as a multimedia fashion event focusing on “real clothes” — low-priced domestic brands with an eye towards street trends. Instead of generic foreign drones imported from Eastern Europe, TGC used young models from popular magazines to parade the clothes on the runway. With its winning formula, TGC found quick success and ultimately rewrote the rules for Japanese fashion: choosing inclusivity over exclusivity and immediate relevance over artistic intention. TGC was “real” fashion for “real” Japanese women. Take a hike, “fake” fashion purveyors!

Now in 2009, Tokyo Girls Collection has taken its rightful place as a core institution of the Japanese fashion world, with big sponsors all clamoring to get a piece of the action. Uniqlo has just offered its second TGC collaboration — spring blazers promoted with popular ViVi model Marie. Last weekend’s 2009 Spring/Summer TGC took the brand line-up into totally new territory: select shops Beams, Kitson, and Free’s Shop, as well as originally-American brands Milkfed and Jill Stuart. All five are much more “fashion-forward” in the traditional snobby sense than the usual Shibuya 109 fare. The inclusion of these brands perfectly illustrated the fact that TGC is no longer a niche event for offshoots of the Shibuya gyaru subculture but an event where 20,000 female consumers with open minds and relatively heavy wallets can congregate and party. In just four years, TGC has become completely and utterly mainstream.

The day after Tokyo Girls Collection, Branding Inc. held TGC’s “little sister” event Shibuya Girls Collection (SGC) on the same Yoyogi National Stadium stage. Most wondered whether back-to-back Girls Collections would not mutually cannibalize audiences, but the pre-show buzz had the younger SGC outselling its big sister TGC. By the day of the event, all tickets for SGC had totally sold out. The day of the show, the arena was completely packed — with even the press seats over-run with eager girls. (Although SGC offered a “Men’s Stage” to show Oniikei fashion brands modeled by Men’s Egg superstars, the crowd was ultimately over 90% women.)

The two Girls Collections essentially share the same format, but SGC is a completely different beast than TGC — almost like the young weekend crowds at Shibuya 109 broke into the stadium and threw their own fashion show. As the name suggests, Tokyo GC is about girls’ street fashion in a wide and comprehensive sense, encompassing the diversity of looks found in Japan’s capital. SGC, on the other hand, is all about the specific gyaru style that emerged in the Shibuya neighborhood in the mid-’90s and remains strong. Accordingly, the SGC atmosphere was much more subcultural and niche than TGC, representing a fashion world that remains under the shadows of the “serious” industry. But despite the more narrow focus, the seats were equally packed at TGC, proving that the Shibuya fashion movement is just as legitimate in size and energy as the “mainstream” of fashion.

That does not mean, however, that SGC is particularly comprehensible to outsiders. I nominally cover the girls’ “street” fashion beat, and yet, most of the details of SGC culture are totally alien to me. TGC employs beloved magazine stars with name-value: celebrities who double as dramatic actresses (like Karina), singers (like Yu Yamada), and general TV talent (like Marie). Many are even known outside the confines of the “real clothes” fashion world. The participating TGC brands too, like Beams, are universally well-known. SGC’s models, in comparison, may draw total blanks even with a hardcore TGC audience. They are total unknowns to anyone besides avid Popteen readers. The “star” model of SGC was Tsubasa Masuwaka — a 23 year-old ex-Popteen model and young mother who is big with the kids in Shibuya but has no connection to the mainstream entertainment industry. (She is sometimes featured on TV shows but only in news stories about her marketing power with teens. Despite her popularity, she is not invited to be a cute tarento on quiz shows.) Tsubasa is just the tip of the iceberg. The crowd’s other favorites — Wei Son, Jun Komori, Yui Kanno, and Kumiko Funayama — also came from Popteen. Admittedly, Popteen is a popular magazine in terms of readers, but representative of a style without much influence on mass culture.

With SGC relying on dokusha “reader” models — young fans of the magazine who volunteer posing and smiling services to magazines for little-to-no money — the model pool was markedly amateur. Most SGC models are about 5′4″ max. Star Tsubasa does not even hit five-foot. The SGC heroes dwarf in comparison to the professional long-legged models of TGC. Of course, these imperfections are what makes the girls so popular with readers: what could be more “real” and imitable than a 4′11″ model? And likewise, opposed to the half-Japanese mania of TGC, almost everyone at SGC is “pure” Japanese. The gap between fans and models at SGC thus becomes incredibly narrow. But since fans pay good money to attend, the models need to look “larger than life.” This needs pushes the girls to ramp up their normally over-tanned and bleach-blond appearance to the maximum degree: dark skin tones, faces caked with glitter, hair curled, crimped, permed, and teased out. They all looked like an army of idealized gyaru robots hot off the beaches of Hawaii.

While SGC’s official cast of characters gravitated towards’ Popteen’s gyaru world, the prevailing fashion style of attendees came straight out of post-gyaru fashion magazine ViVi’s sophisticated and hard-boiled look. The uniform was shoulder-length hair with curled bangs, black leather motorcycle jackets, unzipped hoodie sweatshirts in bright blues, black-and-white horizontal striped T-shirts, high-waist tiered skirts or shorts, big belt buckles, and a man’s fedora. There was also an unexpected outbreak of giant bows propped up in girls’ hair. Perhaps this post-gyaru look is the current style moment for the Shibuya streets — a mishmash of original gyaru surf culture, Ura-Harajuku streetwear, punk influences, high-fashion silhouettes, and the elegant tastes of the original ’90s kogyaru who have graduated from the movement and created their own up-market brands. A more likely explanation is that the hardcore gyaru — those who take the style to formidable delinquent yankii extremes — were not going to shell out the ?3,000 for tickets. Or maybe they were in the cheap seats at top.

So here was the strange divide: the crowds came to see their Popteen idols up-close, and yet, they choose a personal fashion style much more mainstream than the hardcore gyaru formula. Gyaru style originated in the 1990s as an delinquent upper-class high-school subculture, but as the decade progressed, the rich girls ceded leadership to rural working-class yankii followers. The army of sexy and tan kogyaru transformed into monstrous ganguro. Gyaru has returned to its more aesthetically-palatable roots in recent years, but the movement’s heart and values still stay close to the lower socioeconomic stratum, best evidenced by the large crossover between the style and employees at host clubs and low-priced “cabaret-club” hostess bars. So while the audience felt a step apart from the core gyaru style, the models on stage (especially the male models) generally embrace and embody the yankii delinquent lifestyle. This made SGC feel like an act of selling the allure and rebellion of Japanese working class delinquent subculture to middle class kids. Up to this point in Japan, the fashion industry has rarely indulged in this kind of marketing practice. Usually, elements of delinquent subcultures were forced to do their own marketing.

Most analysis on the two Girls Collections tends to focus on the possibilities the events have for the fashion market, as if Japan Fashion Week or even Paris Fashion Week could take a lesson or two from this real clothes festa. But lumping these “fashion shows” all together misses the true dynamic of TGC and SGC: sure, there are clothes traveling down the runways, but everything about the event makes the apparel feel like an afterthought. The multiple giant jumbotrons behind the runway zoom in on the model’s face for almost her entire walk down the path, save a single full-body scan. The press releases always boast about “girls buying clothes on their cell phones right as the clothes hit the runway” but I have never observed this “real-time e-commerce” in the audience; the girls are usually too busy cheering their favorite stars to take the time to buy clothes. Surely brands that participate get a huge promotional bump, but I think the excitement is less about shopping, commercial transactions, and apparel and more about being in the same room as celebrities.

But as much as we believe the Popteen models are the draw, those subcultural folk heroes still lose out to the bigger crowd-pleaser: TV stars. A surprise appearance from Becky — a half-Japanese TV talent who is not a member of the gyaru community by any definition — elicited prolonged and severe screams from fans. After attending a handful of these “real clothes” events, I can tentatively conclude that the crowd is most interested in celebrating “celebrity.” They may love their community icons like Tsubasa, but they go absolutely crazy with the appearance of an honest-to-god variety show regular.

So there is an unconscious tension boiling under SGC between the “gyaru community” and mainstream culture, but while the crowd loves the surprise of celebrity appearance, the 20,000 young women did not show up to Yoyogi National Stadium to see sumo wrestlers and musicians. They want to take part in the Shibuya fashion community. Shibuya Girls Collection proves that there is a huge — and growing — market around the gyaru subculture. Popteen is one of the few magazines to gain readers over the last few years (And the magazine looks more like the deeply working-class hostess-circular Koakuma Ageha by the minute.) As non-community members, we tend to reach for the word “subcultural” to describe SGC’s style and dramatic personae, as if these strange girls are interested in something far removed from our comfortable “mainstream” cultural paradigm. But in fact, the overwhelming popularity of SGC proves how little influence the entrenched mainstream entertainment and fashion worlds have in the 21st century. The powerful forces of traditional industry now all band together for TGC, but even with such support, the mainstream TGC does not really attract any more people than the niche SGC. When it comes to subcultural affiliation, the gyaru numbers are rising and the generic mainstream plurality is shrinking. SGC is not just popular in its own right, but may be a harbinger of bigger things to come for bottom-up culture.

This was cross-published on our sister site clast.

編み物って、楽しい！！

JFWでは、ニットの様々な表情を取り入れ、新たな作品で観客を魅了するeverlasting sprout。デザイナーの村松氏の穏やかな人柄とニットの世界に直接触れることのできる、ワークショップに参加した。

まず目を引いたのは、素材・ディテール・色の違う沢山の糸・糸・糸。大興奮だ！編み物が久しぶりの私は、初心者コースを選択し基本的な鎖編みからのスタート。細編みをプラスして、かわいらしい花のモチーフを作り続け、大小5つの花を1つにまとめた春のニットブローチを完成させた。他の受講生も指導を受けながら、また今回参加したきっかけなどを話しながら、おもいおもいのアイテム作りに没頭。和気あいあいとした優しい時間が、あっという間に過ぎたのは言うまでもない。
細かい手作業から生まれる充実感。間違えてもすぐにやり直しが効く編み物だからこその楽しさを、徐々に思い出した2時間半だった。帰りが一緒になった服飾学校の学生さんとは、次回もワークショップで会いましょう！と笑顔で別れた。

コレクションブランドのデザイナーと親しく接する機会はそうあるものではない。こんな素敵な企画を提案してくれたeverlasting sproutデザイナーの村松氏が発表する、今月のJFWがいっそう楽しみになった。

The young Japanese brand everlasting sprout has been charming crowds at Japan Fashion Week with their very expressive and innovative knit-work. I took part in the brand’s knit workshop a few weeks ago in order to meet designer Muramatsu’s calm demeanor and get a closer look at his “knitting worldview.”

The first thing I saw when I came in was lots and lots of yarns, all in different materials, details, and colors. I was overstimulated! I had not done any knitting for a while, so I picked the beginner’s course and started by doing some basic crochet. Then I added single crochet and started to create a cute flower motif. I finished a spring knit broach that brings together five large and small flowers into one. While learning from the other students, I asked them how they ended up coming. I ended up getting completely immersed in making item after item. The atmosphere was very pleasant, and the hours passed so gently that in no time the class was over.

There’s a nice feeling of accomplishment after doing a lot of intricate work with your hands. Knitting is also fun because if you mess up you can go back and fix the problem. On my way home, I walked with a fashion school student, and we promised to come to the next one too as we parted.

There usually are not very many chances to meet and become friendly with designers from collection brands. I thank Muramatsu from everlasting sprout for very kindly taking the time to hold this event, and now I really look forward to his JFW show later this month.

MEKAS.: everlasting sprout SS ‘09
MEKAS.: everlasting sprout AW ‘08-’09

With the looming recession, many fashion brands are re-evaluating their raison d’être. “Are we providing an escape from reality? Or are we creating timeless pieces to be bought as long-term investments?” For Japanese indie brand Scye, our recessionary 2009 may just be the perfect year for the brand’s core concept: great-looking classic pieces in high-quality fabrics and comfortable cuts.

The new Autumn/Winter ‘09-’10 collection plays further with the designers’ favorite classic designs and fabrics, and like always, they hide all the real innovation beneath the naked eye. Scye’s clothes must be worn to be truly experienced. Pattern cutter Hideaki Miyahara’s signature pivot sleeve on Scye’s coats may look generically “neat,” but you will bless the designers each time you freely swing your arms around.

This season’s collection largely emphasizes the true essence of raw materials, in a loose 19th century prairie feeling. Tweedy wool jackets have that classic burlap grain, perfect to wear when buying feed at a Nebraska general store, while other wool jackets use non-dyed lambswool straight off the beast. One fur sweater comes in yak fur. And yet, many of the natural wool pieces have sparkly shawl sequin collars and pocket-edges — bringing rugged chic into a Eighties party atmosphere. Like many brands, Scye offers a candy-striped cleric colored button-down for men, but the designers toned down the colors in a vintage wash for a totally different effect than the standard preppy model.

In good Scye style, most of the women’s line is identical to the men’s — only produced in smaller sizes. But they hit a more feminine stride with a red plaid nylon-esque silk bottom: skirt in the front, shorts in the back. The poodle-jacket in teddybear fake fur is also a nice touch.

Scye Basics has some incredible retouches of everyone’s favorite coats. The duffel coat (pictured above) fits like a charm and has a few non-functional decorations (like the three buttons at bottom) that mark it off from the pack.

Our original article on Scye: http://mekas.jp/en/brand-profiles/310.xhtml