Tokyo togs: in a new book and a U.S. gallery exhibition, photographer Shoichi Aoki celebrates the wryly imaginative, cross-cultural streetwear of Japan's teenage fashion pranksters - Photography

So far from competing with the elegance of old high art and craft, constantly renewed, Harajuku style coexists as an accepted outlandishness. The business of fashion is to innovate and change; the function of social disciplines and protocols is to resist change and maintain propriety. As these teens mix an anarchic with a ceremonial temperament, they seem to slip in between these two patterns of conduct.

Aoki writes in his brief introduction that teenage fashion took off when it mingled new looks with traditional motifs, such as those he cites: "obi belts, kanzashi hair pins or geta sandals." It turns out that what is polite and demure gets on saucily with what is clownish and brash. For the photographer, the enemy is a grayness that had been introduced into Japan by Western business attire. He has a point, even if his nationalism is weakened a little by the combustible, foreign-derived colors he approves at Harajuku. Yet the teens also vindicate him by layering patterns in a way that seems traditional in Japanese visual sensibility. Out of materials that are often homemade or secondhand, the kids have devised a group persona, ruffled with endless variations. They give us an inventory of types that are constantly broken up within a chameleon mind-set, suitable to that stage in life where the individual self, beset and excited by many tropisms, has not yet fully formed and become personal. Their "revolutionary" movement exhibits a haberdashery of longing, a wanting of it all, within a restrictive and perennial culture. How often do we catch a glimpse of the id of fashion, and how often is it this much fun?

Fruits by Shoichi Aoki, New York, Phaidon Press, 2001, $29.95, contains 276 color photographs. Selected images, supplemented by several new works, were on view at Kevin Bruk Gallery, Miami [Jan. 12-Feb. 23].

Author: Max Kozloff is a freelance critic and street photographer based in New York.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group