This incredible piece on Japanese fashion makes me want to follow Justin's advice, hop on a $500 plane, check into a $30/night coffin, and get my brain melted.
One of the striking things about spending any time among fashion-conscious Japanese kids is how utterly nerdy they can be in their pursuit of cool. In Europe and the United States fashion falls decisively into the category of the frivolous and playful; in Japan the right T-shirt or cap is sought with a kind of dogged intensity, and not just by a fringe group of fanatics. Japanese boys in particular seem to treat fashion in a manner appropriate to stamp collecting or train spotting. Entire magazines are dedicated to the subject of teen boys' haircuts. The look of the moment is to have it bleached to a coppery color, cut into spiky peaks on top, and left shaggy around the ears and neck. The style is called "the wolf," although the boys look less lupine than feline, as if they were chorus members from "Cats."…
The past couple of years saw the flourishing of the yamamba, or "mountain witch" girls, who tanned their skin dark brown, teased their bleached hair into silver snarls, and wore pale pearlized lipstick of the sort not seen since Dusty Springfield; they appear mostly to have retreated back to the mountains, though there are still a substantial number of tanned-and-blonded girls to be seen who model themselves on the look of Ayumi Hamazaki, one of Japan's several Britney Spears derivatives. These girls can usually be found hanging around a store called Egoist, which for a time was so trendy that the salesgirls themselves became icons. They appeared in the company's catalogue, and some of them established their own Web sites to dispense advice to their followers. One of the Egoist girls, a twenty-three-year-old named Shizue Nohara, told me that she'd worked at Egoist for three years. "I like to be the leader and have other people follow me," she said. She was dressed in a gray rabbit-fur jacket and bluejeans, Egoist's theme for the season being "Rodeo Girl." The previous season had been "Sexy and Boyish."
(via Amygdala)
