At the time of its initial establishment in 2005, Tokyo Girls Collection (TGC) offered a revolutionary alternative to the standard industry "fashion show." E-commerce company Xavel (now Branding Inc.) founded TGC as a multimedia fashion event focusing on "real clothes" — low-priced domestic brands with an eye towards street trends. Instead of generic foreign drones imported from Eastern Europe, TGC used young models from popular magazines to parade the clothes on the runway. With its winning formula, TGC found quick success and ultimately rewrote the rules for Japanese fashion: choosing inclusivity over exclusivity and immediate relevance over artistic intention. TGC was "real" fashion for "real" Japanese women. Take a hike, "fake" fashion purveyors!

Now in 2009, Tokyo Girls Collection has taken its rightful place as a core institution of the Japanese fashion world, with big sponsors all clamoring to get a piece of the action. Uniqlo has just offered its second TGC collaboration — spring blazers promoted with popular ViVi model Marie. Last weekend’s 2009 Spring/Summer TGC took the brand line-up into totally new territory: select shops Beams, Kitson, and Free’s Shop, as well as originally-American brands Milkfed and Jill Stuart. All five are much more "fashion-forward" in the traditional snobby sense than the usual Shibuya 109 fare. The inclusion of these brands perfectly illustrated the fact that TGC is no longer a niche event for offshoots of the Shibuya gyaru subculture but an event where 20,000 female consumers with open minds and relatively heavy wallets can congregate and party. In just four years,
TGC has become completely and utterly mainstream.

The day after Tokyo Girls Collection, Branding Inc. held TGC’s "little sister" event Shibuya Girls Collection (SGC) on the same Yoyogi National Stadium stage. Most wondered whether back-to-back Girls Collections would not mutually cannibalize audiences, but the pre-show buzz had the younger SGC outselling its big sister TGC. By the day of the event, all tickets for SGC had totally sold out. The day of the show, the arena was completely packed — with even the press seats over-run with eager girls. (Although SGC offered a "Men’s Stage" to show Oniikei fashion brands modeled by Men’s Egg superstars, the crowd was ultimately over 90% women.)

The two Girls Collections essentially share the same format, but SGC is a completely different beast than TGC — almost like the young weekend crowds at Shibuya 109 broke into the stadium and threw their own fashion show. As the name suggests, Tokyo GC is about girls’ street fashion in a wide and comprehensive sense, encompassing the diversity of looks found in Japan’s capital. SGC, on the other hand, is all about the specific gyaru style that emerged in the Shibuya neighborhood in the mid-’90s and remains strong. Accordingly, the SGC atmosphere was much more subcultural and niche than TGC, representing a fashion world that remains under the shadows of the "serious" industry. But despite the more narrow focus, the seats were equally packed at TGC, proving that the Shibuya fashion movement is just as legitimate in size and energy as the "mainstream" of fashion.

That does not mean, however, that SGC is particularly comprehensible to outsiders. I nominally cover the girls’ "street" fashion beat, and yet, most of the details of SGC culture are totally alien to me. TGC employs beloved magazine stars with name-value: celebrities who double as dramatic actresses (like Karina), singers (like Yu Yamada), and general TV talent (like Marie). Many are even known outside the confines of the "real clothes" fashion world. The participating TGC brands too, like Beams, are universally well-known. SGC’s models, in comparison, may draw total blanks even with a hardcore TGC audience. They are total unknowns to anyone besides avid Popteen readers. The "star" model of SGC was Tsubasa Masuwaka — a 23 year-old ex-Popteen model and young mother who is big with the kids in Shibuya but has no connection to the mainstream entertainment industry. (She is sometimes featured on TV shows but only in news stories about her marketing power with teens. Despite her popularity, she is not invited to be a cute tarento on quiz shows.) Tsubasa is just the tip of the iceberg. The crowd’s other favorites — Wei Son, Jun Komori, Yui Kanno, and Kumiko Funayama — also came from Popteen. Admittedly, Popteen is a popular magazine in terms of readers, but representative of a style without much influence on mass culture.

With SGC relying on dokusha "reader" models — young fans of the magazine who volunteer posing and smiling services to magazines for little-to-no money — the model pool was markedly amateur. Most SGC models are about 5′4" max. Star Tsubasa does not even hit five-foot. The SGC heroes dwarf in comparison to the professional long-legged models of TGC. Of course, these imperfections are what makes the girls so popular with readers: what could be more "real" and imitable than a 4′11" model? And likewise, opposed to the half-Japanese mania of TGC, almost everyone at SGC is "pure" Japanese. The gap between fans and models at SGC thus becomes incredibly narrow. But since fans pay good money to attend, the models need to look "larger than life." This needs pushes the girls to ramp up their normally over-tanned and bleach-blond appearance to the maximum degree: dark skin tones, faces caked with glitter, hair curled, crimped, permed, and teased out. They all looked like an army of idealized gyaru robots hot off the beaches of Hawaii.

While SGC’s official cast of characters gravitated towards’ Popteen’s gyaru world, the prevailing fashion style of attendees came straight out of post-gyaru fashion magazine ViVi’s sophisticated and hard-boiled look. The uniform was shoulder-length hair with curled bangs, black leather motorcycle jackets, unzipped hoodie sweatshirts in bright blues, black-and-white horizontal striped T-shirts, high-waist tiered skirts or shorts, big belt buckles, and a man’s fedora. There was also an unexpected outbreak of giant bows propped up in girls’ hair. Perhaps this post-gyaru look is the current style moment for the Shibuya streets — a mishmash of original gyaru surf culture, Ura-Harajuku streetwear, punk influences, high-fashion silhouettes, and the elegant tastes of the original ’90s kogyaru who have graduated from the movement and created their own up-market brands. A more likely explanation is that the hardcore gyaru — those who take the style to formidable delinquent yankii extremes — were not going to shell out the ¥3,000 for tickets. Or maybe they were in the cheap seats at top.

So here was the strange divide: the crowds came to see their Popteen idols up-close, and yet, they choose a personal fashion style much more mainstream than the hardcore gyaru formula. Gyaru style originated in the 1990s as an delinquent upper-class high-school subculture, but as the decade progressed, the rich girls ceded leadership to rural working-class yankii followers. The army of sexy and tan kogyaru transformed into monstrous ganguro. Gyaru has returned to its more aesthetically-palatable roots in recent years, but the movement’s heart and values still stay close to the lower socioeconomic stratum, best evidenced by the large crossover between the style and employees at host clubs and low-priced "cabaret-club" hostess bars. So while the audience felt a step apart from the core gyaru style, the models on stage (especially the male models) generally embrace and embody the yankii delinquent lifestyle. This made SGC feel like an act of selling the allure and rebellion of Japanese working class delinquent subculture to middle class kids. Up to this point in Japan, the fashion industry has rarely indulged in this kind of marketing practice. Usually, elements of delinquent subcultures were forced to do their own marketing.

Most analysis on the two Girls Collections tends to focus on the possibilities the events have for the fashion market, as if Japan Fashion Week or even Paris Fashion Week could take a lesson or two from this real clothes festa. But lumping these "fashion shows" all together misses the true dynamic of TGC and SGC: sure, there are clothes traveling down the runways, but everything about the event makes the apparel feel like an afterthought. The multiple giant jumbotrons behind the runway zoom in on the model’s face for almost her entire walk down the path, save a single full-body scan. The press releases always boast about "girls buying clothes on their cell phones right as the clothes hit the runway" but I have never observed this "real-time e-commerce" in the audience; the girls are usually too busy cheering their favorite stars to take the time to buy clothes. Surely brands that participate get a huge promotional bump, but I think the excitement is less about shopping, commercial transactions, and apparel and more about being in the same room as celebrities.

But as much as we believe the Popteen models are the draw, those subcultural folk heroes still lose out to the bigger crowd-pleaser: TV stars. A surprise appearance from Becky — a half-Japanese TV talent who is not a member of the gyaru community by any definition — elicited prolonged and severe screams from fans. After attending a handful of these "real clothes" events, I can tentatively conclude that the crowd is most interested in celebrating "celebrity." They may love their community icons like Tsubasa, but they go absolutely crazy with the appearance of an honest-to-god variety show regular.

So there is an unconscious tension boiling under SGC between the "gyaru community" and mainstream culture, but while the crowd loves the surprise of celebrity appearance, the 20,000 young women did not show up to Yoyogi National Stadium to see sumo wrestlers and musicians. They want to take part in the Shibuya fashion community. Shibuya Girls Collection proves that there is a huge — and growing — market around the gyaru subculture. Popteen is one of the few magazines to gain readers over the last few years (And the magazine looks more like the deeply working-class hostess-circular Koakuma Ageha by the minute.) As non-community members, we tend to reach for the word "subcultural" to describe SGC’s style and dramatic personae, as if these strange girls are interested in something far removed from our comfortable "mainstream" cultural paradigm. But in fact, the overwhelming popularity of SGC proves how little influence the entrenched mainstream entertainment and fashion worlds have in the 21st century. The powerful forces of traditional industry now all band together for TGC, but even with such support, the mainstream TGC does not really attract any more people than the niche SGC. When it comes to subcultural affiliation, the gyaru numbers are rising and the generic mainstream plurality is shrinking. SGC is not just popular in its own right, but may be a harbinger of bigger things to come for bottom-up culture.

Image above of Tsubasa Masuwaka comes from the Shibuya Girls Collection site.

See a year-end review of the main Japanese fashion trends and hit items at our sister site MEKAS.

2008: The Year in Trends

The big meta-trend for Japanese fashion this spring/summer is "bohemian," which mainly manifests in loose white cotton tunics and flower-print dresses. Opposed to being a homegrown trend, this new interest in hippie aesthetics is a global fashion industry trend imported into Japan: this year boys got "American/British Trad" and girls got "Bohemian." As a result, the young Japanese bohemians of 2008 reflect none of the "unorthodox or antiestablishment political or social viewpoints" inherent to historical Bohemianism (Wikipedia). The trend is purely visual — a relaxed look using loose natural fabrics, ethnic patterns, and Native American headbands. Dropping any sort of philosophical depth has thus allowed the look to fit equally in the pages of serious high-fashion mag Spur and office-lady-friendly CanCam. In fact, there is an inverse proportion at work: the greatest adopters of the bohemian look tend to be the least likely to have an interest in arty things.

Slightly related to the bohemian trend is the prominent use of keffiyeh amongst both Japanese men and women. The traditional Middle Eastern patterned scarves have been popular in hipster circles overseas as well, but the fashion information complex in Japan has once again mainstreamed a global look to a degree seen nowhere else.

In the West, the keffiyeh have sparked a debate over perceived pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel meanings. In the past, arty Leftist-types intentionally embraced the keffiyeh as a symbol of Palestinian solidarity. Recently Urban Outfitters tried to sell them as simple accessories, but complaints forced them to pull the scarves (before quietly bringing them back in non-traditional colors and a new name: "desert scarves.") The Japanese industry will not have to worry about such political debates; just as bohemianism is only a visual aesthetic, a keffiyeh is just something that looks cute with a sleeveless t-shirt and work-pants. Moreover, Japanese retailers aren’t even calling them keffiyeh (クーフィーヤ) but "afghan stoles" (アフガンストール), based apparently on the "afghan"-style in which they are worn. (An internet search for the word "keffiyeh" in Japanese points to its historical definition rather than a shop list.)

With the item’s name redefined to point miles away from the Palestinian conflict and the patterns reformed to embrace trendy houndstooth-check, Japanese shoppers have few reference points to connect their fashion choices back to a global political context. Many argue that all Japanese culture inherently detaches the signifier from the signified, but this is not entirely true. Japanese punks may not be delinquent enough in behavior, but they are clearly attracted to the aesthetics of punk anger and rebellion. In a similar way, keffiyeh were very popular around 2001 amongst Ura-Harajuku street fashion boys, who found a tough militaristic meaning in the scarves to match their camouflage pants. They may have not known specifics about the PLO, but the context of armed struggle played into the item’s styling.

The keffiyeh used in this year’s fashion, however, is completely politics-free, primarily a result of the process of importation and mediation. Fashion magazines and retailers could easily explain or reference the historical backdrops to both bohemianism and keffiyeh, but they intentionally do not. Why? The broader cultural context would only make these trends’ adoptions more difficult for consumers: if the item is specifically shown to signify a philosophy or political position, the consumer would then be making a "statement" in choosing to wear it. CanCam girls would suddenly have to worry about whether they are "bohemians" instead of "in style."

In general, Japanese fashion is not about statements: it’s about following a set of seasonally-changing rules within a chosen subculture. So the industry is best off pretending like these fashion items are just trends, eliminating all possible barriers for consumers. Depth and context are minefields for selling Japanese fashion.

On November 17, popular Japanese lingerie company Peach John will open a shop within the flagship Shinjuku branch of esteemed department store Isetan. In the last decade, PJ has made a dramatic transformation from a small outfit importing American bras to a catalog sales giant with 20 locations in brick-and-mortar stores. Moving up to Isetan seems like a natural progression for the burgeoning brand, but this will not be just "another store." The language of Peach John’s latest venture hints at a new direction for the company, and more broadly, an intriguing trend in Japanese marketing.

According to the November 6th Senken Shimbun story 「ピーチ・ジョンが伊勢丹本店に出店」, the name of Peach John’s project for Isetan is "Girls from Good Families" — spelled out in katakana 「ガールズ・フロム・グッド・ファミリー」. Senken "translates" this Japanese-scripted English into more standard Japanese as 「良家の子女」.

Peach John’s current stores are mostly located in fashion buildings like Shibuya 109, and the Isetan project is the company’s first foray into department stores. In terms of customer base, Isetan definitely attracts a much different crowd than Shibuya 109. The age range and fashion aesthetics of the two audiences are different, but so are the tax brackets. For 20,000 yen at Shibuya 109, you can buy an entire autumn ensemble; at Isetan, you could maybe buy a single pillow. (But not necessarily one of the nicer pillows.)

Certainly, girls from "good families" are shopping at Isetan, but I find it strange to come out and code these consumers with that exact label. What do you mean by "good family"? Rich? Old money? Does this mean that shoppers from Shibuya 109 are from "bad families"? Or just "less good families"? Does Peach John only want to attract daughters of fourth-generation doctors on the Board of charitable organizations? Or should the big-spending female offspring of loan sharks feel shame towards their lineage when stepping up to the cash register?

The marketing concept is smart, though: in order to attract a zone of consumers willing to pay higher prices for essentially the same product, Peach John will downplay the somewhat tawdry image established in its mass advertising campaigns. PJ’s train ads usually feature busty half-Japanese models like Jessica Michibata, Kelly, and Fujii Rina wearing revealing lingerie inside what appears to be the world’s most adorable brothel. The recent inclusion of Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie on the cover of the catalog may be an attempt to tone down the sex appeal towards men, but regardless, the tenor of the usual messaging probably does not impress the "well-to-do" mother from a "good family" that PJ imagines shops at Isetan. Leopard print bras could besmirch generations of inherited wealth. So Peach John is creating a new pocket for the brand, leaving the "over-stimulating" animal print at Shibuya 109, and creating a special selection at Isetan that moms will happily purchase for their little duchesses and baronesses. Standard PJ references to pole dancing will not be welcome. "Good families" apparently pass down Victorian attitudes towards sexuality from generation to generation.

Peach John’s new strategy further bolsters the idea that income disparity is becoming an obvious part of Japanese social and business life, but I find it odd that marketing language is actually using loaded terms like "良家" (ryouke) to pander to the upper classes. Currently, the New Rich are a much dominant consumer group in Japan than actual "good families." The nouveau riche, however, may like this idea of being treated with social respect solely from their ability to indulge in luxury goods. On the other hand, the girls at Shibuya 109 may begin to question why they are not being labeled as "girls from good families," but they probably aren’t reading daily trade publications to find out the names of their favorite brands’ retail promotion strategies.

For most people, the game of golf elicits an image of greying, balding, and plump males with heavy wallets, sharing no greater pleasure than driving balls on Saturday afternoons with clients and coworkers. Unlike other sports, golf allows the athlete to engage in physical activity in conjunction with business and social needs. Imagine playing half-court hoops in brand-name gear while trying to discuss distribution networks. Golf is a gentleman’s game — mostly because communication is not hampered by too much real sweat. And it costs more than billiards.

In Japan, golf not only plays a major role in business facilitation, but greatly resonated with white-collar workers in the post-war as a symbol of economic prosperity. With so many interested (demand increase) and so many corporate entertainment outlays expanding at the end of the 1980s (demand elasticity increase), golf fees apparently became so high at Japanese courses that flying to Hawaii or California could be a much cheaper alternative to hitting the links down the street. Maybe that was just a myth, but regardless, golf played an important leisure role of the traditional "Japanese Dream."

After the Bubble, that standardized dream lost its luster, and younger hipper men may be inclined to see the sport as a bit old-fashioned. Lately, however, the Japanese Golf Industrial Complex has managed to expand the game’s appeal to a brand new demographic: women in their 30s. Not an issue of AneCan goes by without star model Oshikiri Moe (pictured with a club) divulging her newfound love of the game. Sure there may be some slightly-artificial commercial influences at the heart of the media buzz, but Japanese women have definitely been invited to come along for a drive.

Instead of droning on about the theoretical meanings of Girls Gone Golf and indulging in more puns, we decided to just talk to a 35 year-old female amateur golfer about the game’s appeal.

When did you start playing golf?
When I was about 30. I had interest in playing when I was in my 20s, but I didn’t start until my 30s. I hated it when I was a kid, because television on Saturday and
Sunday was always all golf. It was so boring. But it’s one of the few sports that you can do when you get older.

How did you finally decide to try it out?
The first time I golfed was with my boyfriend. He had never golfed before either. So we decided to learn it together.

Did you do a lot of sports as a kid?
Yes. I always liked actually doing sports more than just watching. I did tennis in middle school and high-school. When I was in my 20s, I skied, snowboarded, and did scuba diving. I also like swimming.

Did you immediately like playing golf?
No, it was super hard. I only continued with it because my boyfriend was doing it with me and he would teach me. But recently, after about five years, I finally learned to enjoy it. At first, I couldn’t improve much, no matter how hard I tried.

What do you like about it now?
Doing it with my boyfriend. It changed our dating life. Before, we would go out to eat or go shopping. But now we tend to go golfing about once a week.

At 18-hole courses?
No, I just do driving ranges and "mini-courses" of 12 holes. Two weeks ago, I did an 18-hole course for the first time.

Do you see a lot of women at these places?
Some. Lots of couples. Mostly couples, probably. Most women are in their 30s up and older. Not really girls in their 20s.

Do you not see the image of golf being too masculine, too "salaryman"?
I don’t think that image really exists anymore, but it is a man’s sport. At first, it was hard for me to go to play by myself.

So is the image getting less masculine?
No, I’m just used to it more.

When do you think this women’s golf boom started?
I started seeing women playing golf in free papers and on TV about a year or two ago. That made it a bit more fun, more fashionable.

What do you see being the biggest challenge to this boom succeeding?
The sport is so based on manners and tradition — wearing jackets, etc. There are a lot of rules and restrictions about what you do at a course. I had no idea about that and was surprised it was so strict. The problem is, if you are new or not very good, you tend to annoy the other people around you. So I think it’s impossible that it’s going to explode from all these girls reading AneCan or whatever.

Do you talk to your girlfriends about golf?
A lot of people talked about it for a while and would ask me about it, but at lot ended up quitting.

How does the boom impact your own interest in playing?
Miyazato Ai and those other female golfers are very cute and TV-ready. Like Yokomine Sakura, Koga Miho, and Koeda Momo.  There’s lots of commercials with female pro golfers, and everyone’s paying attention to the ladies circuit now. They’re all very cute and young. I used to watch celebrity Matsuura Aya’s golf show too. So I feel like there’s a synergy between me watching golf on TV and playing the game myself.