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

Clothing, used as a form of personal expression, has a venerable history. Yet the choice of what to wear is always, of course, affected by community signals, which regulate styles of normal dress and sometimes prompt deviation from them. In the tremor of this exchange, a culture reveals itself, now loudly, now softly. If a fashion trend is achieved with imagination, one can even speak of the creation of a culture, however ephemeral. In the case of Fruits, Shoichi Aoki's recent photographic album of wildly dressed-up (or -down) teenagers in the Harajuku district of Tokyo, one encounters a fashion display that is very loud. We have heard of "clothes horses"; these kids might be thought of as "costume ponies."

Visitors to Japan are often impressed by the high visibility of uniforms, which neatly tag people according to the work they do. Pastry chefs, salesgirls and pachinko hawkers are not only identified as such but also as employees of particular companies or businesses. All regalia in the country are coded; everyone has recognizable garb. Even gangsters, it's said, sport standard gangster outfits. Then suddenly, a few years ago, there appeared some middle-class children plugged into every conceivable media-culture image--from "geisha" to punk to cyber. They blew the world of uniforms to the wind, while at the same time affirming their own togetherness. But it was so colorful, so riotous, so hilarious a solidarity that its ostentatious fusions established a special art form.

Fruits is the title of a magazine (and now a book) created by Aoki, who believes that the heyday of the street scene in Harajuku (ca. 1996-99) marked a revolution in Japanese clothing styles. The period in question corresponds to the days when confidence in the Japanese economy had already begun to falter. True, the consumerism of the adolescents is plain enough, but it pales next to their exhibitionism. Forget about the semiotics of the workforce--these juveniles are walking emblems of cultural playfulness. Indeed, their styles seem to run parallel to the long-established anime and manga phenomena. In Japan's straitlaced atmosphere, such capers might have struck a rebellious note, but I'm not sure they do so for international viewers. Instead of belligerence, symptomized by nose rings or tattoos, most of these kids give us the radiant inappropriateness of their erudition and fantasy. Yeti boots may be combined with Bo Peep aprons and derby hats. Feather boas can offset tracksuits, topped by acrylic wigs. Let us also not overlook the high argyle golfing socks and the kimono swatches, or those plaid bloomers, accessorized with decaled skateboards and plastic see-through lunch boxes.

As all children can draw with marvelous freedom before they take art classes, so these teens can dress with amazing extravagance before they're completely indoctrinated with adult decorum. Though their ranks include some senior citizens of maybe 15 or 16, most of them appear to be younger, and blatantly so--in such exaggerated junior drag that their regressive style might be regarded as a sophisticated charade. Beyond their youth, and the famous Japanese pop-media cuteness that they parody, they play knowingly upon a full gamut of global cultures. At the same time, the ubiquitous, pigeon-toed kiddy accent complicates most sexual references, such as miniskirts and fishnet stockings.

How different are the occasional smiles of the Harajuku set from the sullen frowns and moues of fashion illustration in the West, where a hint of sexual predation sells high-style clothes. But the pictures in Fruits are not fashion shots, they're street photos of hyperstylized subjects, posing for the occasion among civilian passersby. Aoki's wide-angle lens and intermittent use of flash are the tools of an unassuming reporter. He sees a gaudy artifice; he does not employ it. And the subjects, though chronic show-offs, have no idea of how to perform as trained models do. They giggle and wave, or act bashful. Having drawn a stranger's attention, they behave with a conventionalized self-consciousness, the charm of which cannot be associated with a studio set-up.

But what is really astonishing is how distinctly Japanese the youths are, even loaded down with paraphernalia ransacked from a spectrum of cultures. Of course, their physiognomy is unmistakably of their locale. That fact automatically reinforces the disjunction of the spectacle they make, which was on their agenda from the beginning. If a blond Japanese is disconcerting, how much more so is one with fuchsia-colored hair. More important, though, Japanese mass culture somehow naturalizes gaijin forms without integrating them. You see this phenomenon in contemporary Tokyo architecture, which is so unbelievably eclectic as to resemble only itself. Underneath the facility with which multiple imports are adapted, mixed and matched, like the young people's threads, there lies a certain enjoyment of grotesquerie for its own sake.

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.
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