Fashion is a key step in the on-going process of identity construction: self-adornment provides us with a continuous opportunity for self-expression. However, a distinction should be made between fashion and clothing: they are not synonymous. The discrepancy lies in the ephemeral (and somewhat superficial) nature of the 'fashion system.'
As theorist Roland Barthes explains ‘Fashion postulates anachrony… [there] the past is shameful and the present constantly ‘eaten up’ by the fashion being heralded.’ Young people often use fashion to mark themselves as belonging to one of many subcultures originating in urban centres. ‘Goth-Lolita’, ‘Yamanba’ and the ‘Gyaru/Kogyaru’ are potent examples of this. These subcultural groups proliferate via the media (both traditional & social forms) and they can offer an insight into how globalisation and the fashion industry is influencing a burgeoning youth culture.
Often, a person will use garments of clothing and accessories to display their individual and collective affiliations. These may include things like their political views, nationality, and socioeconomic status. Similarly, clothing tends to outwardly orientate our position with regards to gender and sexuality. Nowhere is the use of personal style for assimilation more evident and complex than inmodern-day Japan where young people use clothing as a means to compose their identities and acculturate themselves into specific social groups.
Their frantically-evolving trends have become symbolic of today’s ‘fragmented’ self, in which there is no overriding culture but instead a patchwork of influences cherrypicked from every corner of the world (and cyberspace). It's an anti-essentialist view of the self which reinforces the significance of fashion's role in our day-to-day lives: garments provide the building blocks from which we create our increasingly layered and complex identities.
A sense of community is achieved in subcultures by the performance of being seen in certain styles of clothing that eventually become the signifiers of said group. In this way, the clothing connects people who wish to lead similar lifestyles and have a shared aesthetic. Furthermore, some Japanese subcultures seem to have resisted the Great Masculine Renunciation, meaning that bodily adornment is indulged in equally by both sexes.
Japanese street style is commonly thought to have blossomed from the cultural forms of Manga, Anime and video games that enjoy enduring popularity within the island but also on the global stage. Often, there is no specific social purpose to many Japanese street style movements - unlike some subcultures in the west such as punk - in which political ideology is tightly linked with personal appearance. One hypothesis is that it is simply the ‘visual overload’ of postmodern consumerist culture (advertising, pictorial media, screentime etc.) which pushes youngsters to explore ever-more extreme displays of bodily adornment and modification. They are seen to have become desensitised to imagery and "bored" of traditional presentations of the self.
Young people congregate in the Hokoten (“Pedestrian Paradise”) on days when traffic is banned from the main squares and roads of Tokyo’s Shibuya district and share in their dress, their makeup and their general interests. In this way, a Japanese adolescent who wears, for example, a Victorian-style crinoline and a black lace corset will be identifiable as one who follows the ‘Goth-Lolita’ trend and who will more often than not also listen to the appropriate music, have friends with the same style and shop for the brands associated with the latter. Increasingly, Japanese youth use a creolisation of different elements originating from various cultures and adapt them for use on their 'home turf.'
This is not necessarily a phenomenon of "westernisation" or "homogenisation" because Japanese subcultures tend to adapt and re-contextualise these looks the suit their environment and culture. Sometimes this is by adding in elements of traditional Japanese dress (such as the Kimono). In this way, they celebrate their heritage whilst also acknowledging newer trends like streetwear, luxury branding and athleisure.
The young people of Harajuku and Shibuya are generally seen as being aggressive consumerists, with a wide array of brands catering specifically to different subcultures such as ‘Baby, The Stars Shine Bright’ or ‘Alice and the Pirates’. However, the inverse is also true, as these young adults can be seen as consumer anarchists who are reacting against the hyper-capitalism of developed, prosperous Japan and using handmade and widely sourced items to complete their outfits.
Their often outrageous dress could be seen as a form of political protest through a rejection of traditional consumption habits - they won't buy ‘the hype,’ as it were. Interestingly, it is not just the end product that is significant when it comes to the clothing. Girls use the styling process as a bonding opportunity that allows them to form friendships around mutual interests. Fashion in postmodernity allows us to orientate ourselves socially as much as it does aesthetically.
The branches of Japanese street youth style called ‘Lolita’ or ‘Gothic’ (or the hybrid aesthetic between the two, ‘Goth-Lolita’) first appeared in the early 1990s as a by-product of the popularity of ‘visual-kei’ rock bands, whose outlandish costumes and extreme makeup were picked up on and adopted by devoted fans. Visual-kei is an iteration of glam-rock - think David Bowie at his most lavish with added steampunk and victorian vibes. The term ‘Lolita’ in Japan does not share the sexual connotations that it has in the west regarding Vladimir Nabokov’s novel and instead implies a childish naivety or innocence seen as the ideal state of being.
While the gothic style is similar to its western counterpart, if slightly more adventurous in terms of dress, the Lolita style refers to grown women dressing as virginal-looking ‘doll’ figures and can also include a host of childlike activities such as ‘playing dress-up’ or ‘tea parties.’ Once again, the clothing comes with a host of associated activities and social obligations.
The Lolita trend is often referred to as being a reaction to the overt sexualisation of women in modern Japanese and global mass media and is commonly seen as trivial due to its infantile image. It has been suggested that despite their ultra-feminine appearance, the Lolita style is ultimately made to be intimidating, a fashionable 'fuck you' to older men who fetishize the style. Some theorists relate the glorification of the 'childlike' to the collective trauma of the Japanese defeat in World War Two, with specific reference to Hiroshima.
The paradigm of ‘Kawaii’ represents a facet of collective Japanese youth culture that is commonly seen as being unreasonable or worrying by the Japanese population at large; as these young adults are creating identities and personas that seem more founded in a land of fairy-tales and children’s stories than reality. This escapist movement seems to be a collective rejection by many of the hardships associated with adult life and in a way a suppression of the formation of the achieved and adult self. The ephemeral of Japanese street fashion is particularly relevant to school children and adolescents who forge their new intergenerational identities through clothing. The female version of the Yamanba style took the representation of the American California girl and modified it to make it more extreme. This was a severe contrast to the pale-faced and expressionless geishas that had long represented the traditional beauty ideal.
Male Yamanba style, meanwhile, might be seen as a parallel with the American Hip-Hop stars of the 1980s, with baggy jeans and copious amounts of ‘bling’ around their necks. The excessive tanning of the skin and the white patches of the Yamanba is their interpretation and exaggeration of the appearance of Caucasian females who have slender noses and wide eyes and represent a western ‘beauty ideal’. This trend can be explained partly by the popularity of Hip-Hop music (both western and Asian) amongst Tokyo’s youths. The lifestyles of the rap artists it imitates are aspirational, embodying for the individual wearing it a self-proclaimed prophecy of success.
The Japanese population has long been seen as a ‘quintessential imitator’ of other cultures, either as passive victims of Chinese cultural domination or post-modern American influence, and their transcultural borrowing allocates the same connotations for the Japanese adoptees that it does for the original ‘home-land’ consumers. It is through the Yamanba style that American cultural imperialism is at once asserted and subverted. Worryingly, there has recently been a resurgence in the trend for porcelain white skin in Japan known as ‘Bihaku’ meaning literally ‘beautifully white’.
The popularity of skin whitening products in Japan and the Asian continent can be explained by both the aspirational value of white skin, seen as a hallmark of the prosperous western world and by the old-fashioned representations of Geishas and the aristocracy that connote power and exclusivity. Changing one’s racial appearance might be considered as the ‘final taboo’ of body modification: the ultimate rejection of the skin and identity into which we are born. In a world that is increasingly fashion-literate and in which everything is progressively customisable this age of sartorial hyper-individualism shows no sign of slowing down.