Wednesday, January 7, 2009

1.07 // Japanese street style: a world unto its own

While most of us look into our closets and see jeans, boots, sweaters, dresses, all that... it seems that the youth of Japan have got Hip & Cool nailed down, to a T. Where we have browns, greens, and greys, they have hot pink, turquoise, zebra stripes and Day-Glo orange.
And somehow, they pull it off with the same style & grace that Kate Moss pulls off... well, anything. How do they do it?

Harajuku Style Makeup

http://mocoloco.com/art/books_freshfruits_oct_06.jpg

Any normal - well, non_japanese - person would look like an absolute clown trying to pull this off. But these two? Nah, no biggie - just another normal day. (Heck, you should see them when they dress up!)

Japanese Cosplay Style Character

Well there you have it. Dressed up. (For what? Anything in particular? We'll never know...)

http://www.fashionstudentsource.com/ny/wp-content/uploads/style-arena3.jpg

http://www.artofthesteal.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/japan-forum.jpg

I particularly like that photo - goth, yet chic & elegant. I love the middle outfit, especially the hat (of course!), but all 3 are spectacular.

A big thing over there is cosplay: dressing up and even acting like characters from manga, anime, comic books, and other East-Asian media. Gotta love how it turns out ~

http://img45.imageshack.us/img45/5484/cosplay094oa2.jpg

http://cosplay.anim-e-motion.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/cosplay095du7.jpg

Cosplay at NTU - beautiful costume full length shot

Cosplay at NTU - girl with attitude

(Notice the girl in the background too!)

Cosplay at NTU - group

Love the shoes on the right.

There are whole cosplay conventions, often associated with video games. Sort of like science fiction conventions here... but it'd be frowned upon to come dressed up as someone like Hitler. There, that's considered a great cosplay costume. (Cosplay = costume + play).

and our look du jour:

Twiggy

Twiggy. Of course.

Don't worry, I'll get to her pretty soon...

~ r

4 comments:

  1. What a crazy style Japanese people have, I remember when I went to a Japan festival and it was awesome because I could see incredible hair styles, actually a man recommended me to take Generic Viagra instead of drugs because they get powers with that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JAPANESE style is not STARNGE, and the pictures you have is probably from some COSPLAY place. COSPLAY is normal in JAPAN, it's like you would dress up as a movie character but a lot more normal, almost every teenager in JAPAN loves COSPLAY...

    ReplyDelete
  3. I love all about Japan, like Viagra Online Oriental graveside ! Specially their womens... they're gorgeous and also the fashion style in the island isn't awful enough, actually they have a huge industry about design.

    ReplyDelete