Introduction
This study will outline a brief history of Harajuku street fashion since the late 1970s, focusing on the interplay of invention and convention, authenticity and artifice, innovation and imitation. Borrowing from De Certeau’s tactical everyday resistance and Roland Barthes’ structuralist application of dress and dressing in fashion, it will consider the ways in which the players in Harajuku change the meaning of available dress objects in the process of their individual dressing.
The article is informed by observational research done in Tokyo in 2006 and 2007 and woven throughout the text are insights from a broad range of artists and writers. The chapter Origins and Spread looks at the question of where fashions come from and how they are circulated. Academic accounts to date have tended to overemphasise the process of fashion imitation by the lower classes followed by aversion by the elite, when in fact the operation is more complex. The purity of subcultural styles should also not be overstated, and examination of Harajuku shows the process of fashion origin and spread to be highly layered and multi-directional. Of particular note here is the new model of fashion media that came out of Japan’s youth fashion cultures of the 1990s whereby professionally styled editorial shoots were replaced by images of normal’ people in their self-styled creations.
In considering the relationship between individuality and conformity, the study turns to Pierre Bourdieu’s account of taste and distinction and recognises the inherent paradox of fashion, whereby it forms a statement of criticism as well as a shared expression of a desire for sameness. When it comes to so-called rebellious subcultural fashion, the process of commercial recuperation can be particularly problematic, but as Harajuku dress-ups are often self-consciously and retrospectively imitative they don’t face this predicament of authenticity that the western subcultures they borrow from did. The highly subjective, personal and sensual relations people have with clothing is also necessarily acknowledged here.
In the chapter Clothes Wear Us, the discussion of the potential political dimensions of fashion opens upan examination of performativity and identity in Harajuku, particularly with regards to gender politics. Another way to consider the interplay of individuality and conformity in dress is to look at uniforms in contemporary Japan, in particular the phenomena of the fetishised schoolgirl uniform. Kogals are read as subjecting themselves to the paedophilic male gaze, while also evading certain structures of power by creating their own sphere of inclusion. Similarly, in the chapter Empowered Cuties?, kawaii is read on one level to be making young women present themselves as naive and vulnerable, but also to be offering them a space for rejecting the adult responsibilities they are expected to aspire to. This part of the thesis owes much to McVeigh’s inquiry into uniforms in Japan and Sharon Kinsella’s extensive work on Japanese cuteness.
Forming several links between traditional Japanese dress and contemporary fashion, I look at a deconstructionalist approach to dress and dressing, whereby usually hidden structures of dress are brought to the surface. Interrogating the fashion system from within that system, these teens in Harajuku bring into question the very meaning of dress. Their foregrounding of artifice is situated in a wider urge for blatant theatricality that is traced in several areas of Japanese art and life, and the aestheticising of impracticality is seen as overcoming any pretence of naturalness in fashion, and thus regaining a type of honesty. The final chapter, New Face, New Life, offers a consideration of the mask in Japanese culture and of performative fashion as a type of masking. Rather than something that merely hides, examples of masking in Japanese culture are used to define the mask as something that reveals while it conceals, possessing a unique capacity for truthfulness.
I do not wish to delve into myths of Japanese uniqueness or some constructed cultural collective subconsciousness, nor do I have any pretence of being able to deal with a unified or continuous Japan’. Points of consideration span myriad examples within this thing we call Japan, and what follows is a series of trajectories tracing a thread of ideas about self-consciously eccentric bodily presentation. Rather than being treated as some strange, exotic enclave, the radical fashion of Harajuku is used for thinking about wider ideas relating to the possibilities (and limitations) of resistance through dressing. In the broadest sense the study comes from my longstanding curiosity about the primal human urge towards body adornment and the relationship between appearance and truth.
