Reconstructing a National Silhouette: Avant-Garde Fashion and Perceptions of the Japanese Body (original) (raw)
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Japanese Fashion Cultures: Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan
2015
Japanese contemporary culture, including fashion, has increasingly gained popularity outside Japan, making it a timely topic for both scholarly and wider publics. Most current studies of popular culture focuses on manga, anime, and other such forms of visual culture, and dress and design studies are also emerging as a rapidly growing field. Building on the works of McVeigh (2000), Miller (2006), Slade (2010) and Steele (2010), this book addresses this new interest in an innovative fashion, expanding the significance of dress and delving into a wide range of examples from films, magazines, music videos and literature. By connecting diverse topic areas including dress, gender, media and cultural studies, Japanese Fashion Cultures analyzes the relationship of fashion aesthetics and gender identity within an increasingly interconnected, transnational world. The book pays particular attention to the relationship of past and present. It examines contemporary Japanese fashion trends that adopt and restyle European historical clothing forms: the Edwardian dandy style, Victorian little girls’ dresses, and the Rococo and Romantic dress typical of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Japanese fashion culture actively promoted European clothing styles both politically and aesthetically, particularly since the country’s re-engagement with Euro-America in 1868. Throughout this book, I refer to the theory of “format” and “product” articulated by cultural sociologist Keiko Okamura (2003) where a cultural form, in this case Euro-American clothing styles, can be seen as a “format” when accepted globally. This standardized “format” becomes a carrier of the locality of cultures, allowing its “local” characteristics to be visible, measurable, and comparable with that of other cultures. Through this theoretical idea, I explain complex cultural theory using compelling examples. For instance, differences in preferred modes of masculinity and fashionability in Japan and Euro-America will be explained via garments and advertisement campaigns of Dolce and Gabbana. This process will therefore reveal the characteristics both universal and culturally specific to the Japanese context, including the ways in which Japanese men and women engage with fashion today. This poses a challenge to a widely held, often Eurocentric notion that Japanese men and women simply desire to imitate their Euro-American counterparts. Japanese Fashion Cultures provides comprehensive insights into representations of clothes and gender in a society still poorly understood by outsiders. I dispel the popular misconception that Japan approves of gender inequalities and that women still occupy inferior social positions to men, expressed also in clothing. I argue that using the lens of fashion reveals the complexities of gender relations in Japan. Four contemporary case studies position the argument: young men’s fashion magazines, female performers’ use of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” in music video, “Lolita” fashion and Tetsuya Nakashima’s film Shimotsuma monogatari (Kamikaze Girls, 2004), and the continuing remarking of “Ivy-League” style in Japan. These four examples are notable for their adoption of historic European and American clothing forms. Their relatively “mainstream” stature in contemporary Japanese culture comes with a “twist” or unconventional characteristics. The “mainstream” standing of these types of popular culture indicates their reach, consumed by a great number of individuals within Japan. Certain qualities they manifest, on the other hand, impose a subtle, almost “delicate” kind of revolt against a set of idées fixes surrounding the relationship between clothes and gender. Using media and cultural texts as a primary source for discussion enables consideration of these complex links between distortion and reality. As Diana Crane (1990) has argued, both are parts of the “real” world where these case studies are first produced. The first important issue this book raises is that, through negotiating male readers’ desire to attract admirers and to dress for their own pleasure, young men’s fashion magazines endorse the idea that crafting a pleasant look is the foundation of self-assurance and a successful life. Secondly, I show that female Japanese singers allow an accentuation of femininity without necessarily sexualization through the use of Japanese cute (kawaii) aesthetics. The third possibility this book explores is that highly decorative styles of Japanese Lolita fashion should not be read as symbolic of restriction and passivity. The fourth point this book addresses is that, as illustrated by the Japanese embrace of the “Ivy style,” both men and women engage with fashion in very similar ways. This is a major point of difference with the role of fashion historically in Euro-America. These readings offer novel ways to understand the relationship between gender and dress, which is often blamed for maintaining repressive distinctions between “man” and “woman” in contemporary culture. Ultimately, this book aims to show that the Japanese appropriation of European clothing forms shows that there might be different, and hence less rigid approaches to understanding the relationship between fashion and gender. Japanese refashioning of European clothing concepts, this book argues, offers a compelling case for the implication of the aesthetics of fashion, gender, and cross-culturalism. “Masafumi Monden's book is a gem. By bringing together and exploring colourful examples from Japan's vibrant street culture and fashion, he artfully demonstrates just how individualistic, innovative, and original the Japanese are. He also dismantles myths and misperceptions about gender relations, sexuality, and social relations in Japan.” – Brian J. McVeigh, University of Arizona, USA, “Monden provides a rich and detailed examination of the subtle intricacies of gendering and sexuality in contemporary Japanese fashion. While exploring the extremes of Tokyo street fashion he is able to illuminate some of the mechanism behind the perplexingly divergent ways to be a man or a woman in today's Japan.” – Toby Slade, University of Tokyo, Japan, “Masafumi Monden's fascinating and important book, Japanese Fashion Cultures, will be of great interest to everyone interested in fashion, gender, globalization, and youth culture. His research on young Japanese men and their attitudes towards fashion is especially significant, as it calls into question persistent stereotypes about how men and women are assumed to engage with fashion.” – Valerie Steele, Director and Chief Curator, The Museum at FIT, New York City, USA “From the possibility of subversion in lace-trimmed Lolita outfits and petite pinafores straight out of Alice in Wonderland, to the enchantments of Milkboy dandyism, Masafumi Monden's Japanese Fashion Cultures offers up a delightful combination of case studies that reveal the very best thinking in fashion theory today.” – Laura Miller, Eiichi Shibusawa-Seigo Arai Endowed Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of Anthropology, University of Missouri–St. Louis, USA "Masafumi Monden’s Japanese Fashion Cultures shines a spotlight on many of the looks that brought the world’s attention to an island nation which, like Britain, has consistently punched above its weight in matters of dress and appearance...In Japanese Fashion Cultures you have some most interesting comments about gender and I for one have learned a lot about the less reported (in the West at least) looks for young Japanese males." - Ted Polheums, Author of Streetstyle: From Sidewalk to Catwalk
Refashioning the Romantics: Contemporary Japanese Culture -Aspects of Dress
Clothing is often perceived as a device to create, define and demarcate the gender binary. Accordingly, there are sets of preconceptions regarding ways in which men and women are assumed to engage with fashion. The research presented here reviews three of these ideas, some of which have been challenged by scholars but which are, still persistently, present in popular culture. Such preconceptions assume that men prioritize functionality over aesthetics and are the bearers, not the objects of the gaze, while women’s fashion is represented through multiple binaries of sexualisation and restriction, and female sartorial ornamentation is seen as symbolic of subservience. I investigate these presumptions via three contemporary Japanese cultural texts –(a) Japanese young men’s fashion magazines, (b) Japanese female performers’ appropriations of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” in their music videos, and (c) Lolita fashion and Tetsuya Nakashima’s film Kamikaze Girls (2004), respectively. My study of these three selected texts explores the following possibilities that: (a) through negotiating the male reader’s desire to attract admirers and narcissistic impulse, young men’s fashion magazines endorse an idea that “crafting” the pleasant “look” is a part of quintessence of self-assurance and the idea of a good, successful life; that (b) kinds of Japanese cute (kawaii) and girlish aesthetics demonstrated by the Japanese singers allow them to accentuate their “cute” femininity without a hint of sexualisation, and; that (c) one of the heroines in Kamikaze Girls engages in both conventionally “masculine” and “feminine” activities while almost always dressed in the highly elaborate, girlish Lolita fashion. My examinations of these texts arguably renders the cultural and social-psychological conceptions of “gender performativity” and “androgyny” effective and credible. The Japanese context is appropriate for this aim because this is where, particularly since 1868, European sartorial styles have been actively promoted, both politically and aesthetically. Consequently, Japan has become an ethnographically unique space where the subtle marriage of European dress style and Japanese aesthetics has taken place. Along with the theme of fashion and gender, this research attempts to unearth the meanings behind processes of Japanese adaptation, appropriation and restylisation of European sartorial and aesthetic concepts. Japanese appropriation and refashioning of European sartorial concepts, this research argues, offers a unique interpretive illustration of the aesthetics of fashion and transnationality.
International Journal of Fashion Studies, 2018
The 2017 exhibition Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons – Art of the In-Between at the Metropolitan Museum in New York exposed the rich work of the iconic Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo to a larger western audience. As the title of the exhibition indicates, Kawakubo's work does not fit well within some of the classic conceptual assumptions around fashion, but can be placed as something 'in-between'. The show and printed museum guide were arranged around a series of conceptual dichotomies that Kawakubo's work transgressed. Yet these transgressions also exposed the arbitrariness of central distinctions in fashion and questioned how universal key concepts in fashion really are. In examining the printed guide to the Kawakubo show, this text challenges the intercultural applicability of concepts such as 'fetish' and 'copy' across cultural spheres in fashion studies, and questions the universal application of such concepts to unpack meanings and practices in fashion.
Pop Culture and the Europeanization of Mainstream Japanese Women’s Fashion 1945–65
Abstract In recent years, social historians and cultural studies scholars have begun to examine the manner in which post-war Japan simultaneously reconstructed and reimagined an urban youth culture. This new culture drew heavily of course, on the influences of the American occupation, especially in the area of popular entertainment, sports and lifestyle-based consumption. Yet while the occupation-driven social and cultural changes were unquestionably deep and enduring, they by no means eradicated the aesthetic influences of the pre-war era. In those inter-war years, significant elements among the ranks of newly urbanized elite and middle-class women in the Kantou and Kansai regions, had, like their male counterparts, looked to Europe as the source of all that was modern and sophisticated. This article explores the manner in which pre-war European and post-war American popular-culture influences, as well as domestic economic and socio-cultural movements during the both the occupation and the boom years of the late 1950s and early 1960s, acted to shape the fashion styles adopted by middle-class Japanese women.” Beginning with an exploration of the complex legacy of the occupation with its combination of high-levels of prostitution juxtaposed with women’s legal empowerment, it goes on to explores the impact of women’s intense exposure to 1950s western and Japanese movies as well as fashion magazines and the mass media images of early-1960s female pop icons managed by the all-powerful Nabepro production company. By doing so it seeks to uncover the manner in which the aspirational female-driven consumer boom of the early 1960s allowed Japan’s post-war fashion industry to emerge from American cultural domination and develop a European-focused fashion sensibility that would lead to its emergence as a world-wide style-maker and arguably the most sartorially-conscious nation in the developed world today
Japan as fashion: Contemporary reflections on being fashionable
Acta Orientalia Vilnensia, 2011
This paper examines how Japanese contemporary fashion has been accepted globally, especially in the case of London. The popularity of Japanese fashion in the West started in the 19 th century with kimono-style dressing gowns, but for the true design influence known as Japan-shock, we had to wait for the appearance of the avantgarde Japanese fashion designers who participated in the Paris collection in the 1970s and 1980s. A new keyword for 'fashionable Japan' today is kawaii, the notion of cute. This is intimately linked to street fashion and subculture and has been established and received as part of 'cool Japan' through the worldwide popularity of Japanese manga and anime. Moreover, it could be said that Japan is fashionable and the Japanese are thought of as fashionable people, but who is described as fashionable, and by whom? To reflect upon this statement, 'the Japanese are fashionable', as ideology, picking up the globally popular Japanese street fashion magazine FRUiTS, I would like to investigate the double meaning of fashion in the present and also what it means to be fashionable.
Fashion as a Cultural Intertext
2021
In accordance with Gilles Lipovetsky (2002), this paper explores fashion, its current form and functions, as a consequence of the development of the modern Western world. Although the author points out different possibilities for the discursive reading of fashion in the cultural space, emphasis is put on the discourse led by the rise of an individualized subject, which is a symptom of modern democratic societies. Within this frame, fashion is a proof of individualistic tendencies and autonomous subjectivity, which enable it to function as an important tool of self-expression for both the individual and diverse social communities. In this context, fashion clothes-functioning as a costume-claim authenticity as well as other qualities that strengthen the differentiating possibilities as well as capabilities on the axis me/us, he/you, own/ other. Moreover, the language of fashion has been influenced by globalization in recent decades, which encourages the emergence of culturally layered texts and the circulation of various kinds of cultural borrowings. With regard to this issue, the paper focuses on the Japanese street fashion 'Harajuku' as a representative example of what will be considered as an intertextually-coded individualized subcultural costume.