Note:
A pair of fierce, medieval-inspired A. McQueen boots very well worn.
Note the gloves that pull everything together.
This fabulous sharp dresser photographed here is Yumi, the owner of the mainly vintage fashion boutique, Sister, in Tokyo. Featured in all Japanese street snap sites that matter, she’s credited as one of the chicest women in the current Japanese fashion scene in SPUR’s Febuary 2010 issue. (See bottom of post for a little intro on SPUR.)
I’ve been wanting to write about Sister for a while but couldn’t manage to pull together enough time to do something half decent. Fortunately, I just came across an English interview Tiffany Godoy, famous for covering Japan’s avant garde fashion, with a focus on the Gothic, did with Yumi and Fuyuri, Yumi’s partner in revolutionizing Japanese femininity, on her Colette blog. I deem that enough to exonerate me from actually writing an intro myself, at least for now.
Sister’s official blog is a must see, with daily updates showcasing new arrivals modeled by Yumi, Fuyuri, and staff. It doesn’t matter whether you can read Japanese; the pictures are enough in themselves.
Better yet, everything can be bought online, so you can be anywhere in the world and still partake in the chicness that is Sister. No idea how much international S&H costs, but my past experience is that Japanese online stores tend to use the very fairly (even cheaply) priced Japan Post EMS service that delivers your precious online gems to your physical door step in a couple days, and the stores generally charge only the actual delivery cost and no handling fee, which is a bliss.
Special recommendation: Check out Sister’s spectacular store-brand tights.
* * *
That ends the first of my planned series of hip Tokyo boutique and personality mini profiles. ;-)
* * *
Additional context:
SPUR is a well-established Japanese monthly that features fashion from the Western runway and uses only Western models, also perhaps the first Japanese mainstream fashion rag to garner international attention, mentioned every now and again on (Western) fashion insider blogs like The Imagist. Japanese models need to establish themselves on the global stage first to be given a go in there, which doesn’t apply to fresh Caucasian faces. Both the sole focus on brands currently popular in Western press and the use of a constantly changing cast of non-Japanese models deviate from the Japanese norm.
* * *
Why writing so much all of a sudden, after I just declared semi-hiatus?
Such is the joy of minor insomnia.
photographed: the aforementioned KIMURA Kaera.
I cropped out 1/3 of the original.
Some background:
So-en (装苑, roughly “clothing place,” “clothing studying place,” or “garden of clothes”) is a semi-professional fashion monthly from Bunka (literally “culture”) Publishing, a subsidiary of Bunka Education Group and a sister organization of Bunka Fashion College, which is the Japanese equivalent of Fashion Institute of Technology in the US. Almost all Japanese designers with a personal brand are Bunka graduates.
The magazine’s yearly So-en Award is an open-submission contest and is given to an emerging talent. Kenzo Takana and Yohji Yamamoto are both past winners.
Some of my favorite fashion ideas from the March 2010 Zipper.
The print quality itself sucks, so I can’t help with the scan quality either. Sorry about that. I strongly recommend getting your own copy. There’s so much good stuff in this issue that scans even more poorly than these.
Wearing Gaga’s lacy bunny ears on the head looks too costumey on the street. But putting a pair of flimsy bunny ears (or stuff like that) in your hair… Now that’s a fabulous idea.
And in case you’re wondering: No, the girl on the left is not Chanel Iman.
Zipper only uses Japanese models.
Love the layered lacy drapes vest on the right, and the belted-scarf-plus-boots look on the left. And the hair!
Bleached and dyed hair ends + tacky prints + solemn military-esque jacket. Exactly what I’ve been wearing a lot lately. But I prefer long skirts.
March Zipper is out.
Why you should care? Because there’s a 90% probability that you’d be looking at one of Marc Jacobs’s 2011 collections. From what I’ve seen in recent years, it’s a safe bet that Jacobs has a standing Zipper subscription.
When it comes to how much he takes “inspiration” from Japanese fashion, the line between “inspiration” and “copying” is very, very blurry. But there’s no arguing that he knows what are the right things to pick and how to tweak them to make them not only appear attractive to a Western/ global mainstream audience, which the originals often aren’t, but look good on them too, which most other equally “inspired” designers (mostly American) fail to.
Content preview here.
Note: The preview platform does not work on all browsers.
If you see nothing, it means it’s not working. If you see pictures but not the page-flip and zoom-in/ out menu at the bottom, then it’s partially working; you can still flip the pages by clicking on the bottom page corners, but no zoom-in for you. If see you see everything I’ve mentioned, congrats!
The cover model is KIMURA Kaera (pronounced “ka-eh-ra.” Capitalization indicates family name), a popular model/ celebrity in Japan, known for her personal style and on-camera presence. This is their 200th issue, so they got ARAKI Nobuyoshi to shoot the cover and a tiny fashion spread. The choice of Araki is a very odd one, as Zipper is one of the most unsexy fashion magazines ever (it’s really all about the clothes), while Araki is essentially the Japanese Terry Richardson. There’s no point in hiring Richardson if you don’t want your pictures to look sex-y in any way, which is exactly the problem with this shoot. The Araki assignment ended up being one of the weakest Zipper shoots ever, if not the weakest. Both model and photographer seem strangely uncomfortable with what they are doing. I wouldn’t be surprised if these are also Araki’s worst pieces.
Araki disappointment aside, the fashion/ art photographer NINAGAWA Mika has an interesting monthly one-page photo feature in Zipper. It’s not necessarily about fashion but always exorbitant and fantasy-driven, a kind of fantasy that you can live in real life if you want to, just like Japanese fashion.
This month’s NinaMika column captures the “Mori Gyaru” (forest girl) trend that’s getting very mainstream (read: commercialized and commoditized and boring-ized) lately. It’s kinda unoriginal interesting and/ but very well realized, except that because of the print quality, it’ll translate very poorly in a scan, so I’m skipping it. Check out Nina’s own site instead.
P.S. I love how Mademoiselle Agnés satirizes Jacobs in Habilées .
“Popteen” is a mainstream fashion magazine for girls in their late teens to early twenties and is basically aimed at the Paris Hilton-adoring crowd. It has a yearly kimono feature which coincides with the Japanese “Coming of Age Day,” on which girls who have turned twenty in the past year put on kimonos and elaborate hairdos to celebrate the rite of passage. This is the Popteen issue I await each year. Love the exuberance of it.
For a random selection of mid-sized scans from this issue (legal), go here.
For a complete issue preview (not legal), go here.
The huge-fabric-bow-everywhere trend you see in this issue was more or less inspired by Lady Gaga’s infamous hair bow and first promulgated by the much more fashion-forward Zipper magazine last summer.
Been waiting for spring to experiment with not-chic-not-punk pearls and transparent fabric.
