Commentary on youth culture, the ones with all the supposed disposable income:
February 24, 2002
Do You Otaku?
By AMY M. SPINDLER
modest proposal: Tokyo is the real international capital of fashion. Not Paris, which has claimed the title for decades; not New York, which clings to its market domination for the crown; not even Milan, where industrialists make the business an art.
Being the capital of fashion isn't about who has the boutiques or the runway shows or the fashion magazines, although Tokyo has plenty of those. To be the true capital of fashion, fashion must dominate everything. It must be the passion of the masses and the connoisseurs. It must be the primary mode of expression beyond art, film, music. It must be a place where fashion is treated as a necessity, not a luxury. And that is Tokyo, a city where -- outside the most obscure underground shops -- lines form for the latest T-shirt. It's the only city in the world where creating fashion is treated as an intellectual pastime. Ask who the greatest living artist in Tokyo is, and a surprising number of people won't name a writer or a painter; they'll name Rei Kawakubo. Or Junya Watanabe. Fashion designers.
''Fashion is taken very seriously in Tokyo,'' says Watanabe, considered the greatest technician in his field. ''People think a lot about it. They really believe that it's the best way they know to express themselves, and that's very inspiring for a designer to create newer and newer things. There are always people who want to conform, and that's true here, too, but there's a much larger number of people who use clothes to express their real selves.''
Tokyo is the capital of fashion because, from the cheapest pair of jeans to the most overpriced, misunderstood designer masterpiece, it inspires otaku in the population. Otaku is the best word to learn first before going to Tokyo. Otaku was once a derogatory term used to describe someone who is so consumed by a subject that he risks becoming a shut-in. But now otaku means ''deep passion.'' About anything.
''Every hipster who goes to Tokyo comes back learning two words: kwaii, which means 'cute' and otaku, which means 'obsessive,''' says the pop conceptual artist Tom Sachs, who's become otaku about Japanese kwaii to the point where it regularly shows up in his work. ''The thing that's interesting is when you combine those two things. That's what Hello Kitty is.''
John Jay, who, as the creative director of Wieden & Kennedy advertising in Tokyo, has helped create otaku for Nikes in a generation, explains that ''young sneakerologists can tell you the history of any brand, shoe by shoe. And the Levis freaks know their Levis by the color of the thread and the year of the launch.''
People who pride themselves on their otaku can discern the slightest alterations in design, he says. Which has created a dream culture for fashion designers, who can change a trim from orange to blue and sell yet another. Lines formed for days when the largest Louis Vuitton store in the world opened in Tokyo a few months ago; understanding the culture intimately, the company offered a series of limited-edition pieces for the event.
Generous as artists, Tokyo designers have also developed what is called double, and sometimes even triple, branding. Yohji Yamamoto designs for Adidas. Hiroshi Fujiwara works for Nike. Fujiwara, who introduced punk and hip-hop music and fashion into the local culture as a D.J. and designer, argues that it was the Japanese who invented the ''select'' store.
Select stores are now buoying fashion shopping internationally; these carefully curated shops fetishize one of everything, from The Best Tennis Shoe to The Best DVD Player. The most heralded select stores are Carla Sozzani's 10 Corso Como, in Milan, and Colette, in Paris, which looked so innovative when it opened. But ''when I went to Colette,'' Fujiwara says. ''I thought it was old-fashioned. Those stores were popular here 10 years ago.'' Select stores, shrines to persnickety consumption, would naturally have been born in Tokyo. Sozzani and Kawakubo are collaborating on a new one there right now.
Fashion is always sensitive to the stage it's forced to perform on, and Tokyo's is the most insistent on modernity in the world. Unsentimental and starkly aggressive, Tokyo makes it easy to see why almost no local designer, with the exception of Yamamoto, has ever bothered to revisit the kimono. In this environment, it would feel as dated as donning a fig leaf. It is, overwhelmingly, a town without retro.
And the clothes reflect that. As much as the prevailing view of the Japanese has long been that they have a culture obsessed with owning, having, buying, their attitude toward possessions is comparatively blase. The 80's stereotype of the Japanese shopaholic was wrong; it was fashion they were drunk on. The art boom that seized New York in that era skipped Tokyo entirely; there was a fashion boom instead, led by Kawakubo, Issey Miyake and Yamamoto, whose daughter Limi is now designing a line for his company.
The American roadshow of antiques and inherited junk not only isn't indulged, but also isn't even possible. Kyoichi Tsuzuki's seminal interiors book, ''Tokyo: A Certain Style'' (Chronicle, 1999), gave the aesthetic of the typical Tokyo one-room apartment a name, ''the cockpit effect,'' and defended the tiny, overcluttered look as more of a style than the Zen empty spaces people imagine. ''If you can't find one person around you living the other way, it can hardly be considered a style,'' he scoffs. The newest trend, according to Sonya Park, an influential stylist in Tokyo, is buying a plot of land the size of a parking space and building a tiny house on it, as she and her husband are doing. And everyone, she says, is moving back to the city from the more spacious suburbs.
So, change in fashion is constant, by necessity. There isn't a fashion archive in the closet to dive into; most of the time, there's no closet. Colorful clothes adorn apartments in Tsuzuki's book like artwork. And on any given day outside inexpensive shopping Meccas, like Laforet in Harajuku or the 109 building in Shibuya, there are a dozen photographers capturing the way girls are dressing that day, at that moment. Which in turn offers incentive for the teenagers to outdo themselves every day, and to change the next day.
Local fashion publications, all somewhat similar in intent to Lucky magazine in America, don't do elaborate fashion shoots. Who needs fashion stylists when the city's young edit and design themselves so articulately and inventively? Magazines like Fruits, Mini, Jille and Cutie are bought devotedly because the girls so often find themselves on their pages. They are monthly diaries of their fashion lives, sold in the same stores as the clothes the magazines outdate.
Gone are the much-photographed Ko-gals, who with their suntans and blond locks animated the trendy shopping streets of Shibuya. Famously passionate about the cartoon imagery of manga (comic books), the girls almost seemed to be turning themselves into manga heroines, becoming as surreal as possible.
Yet with the same fervor, they are now turning themselves toward the real. The cutting-edge aesthetic ''boystyle'' is more earthy and utilitarian. Shibuya, with its nihilistic neon, is said to have inspired Ridley Scott's ''Blade Runner,'' but it's impossible to say whether the streets have inspired 1,000 video games or the video games have inspired the streets. Slowly, the cooler kids are gravitating toward the discreet shops of Naka-Meguro, the neighborhood where the former assistant of the hot British designer Marjan Pejoski keeps his shop, Arvage.
''Real'' in Japan is, of course, a relative term. For instance, the young and chic are turning out for Shooto on Sundays, which is an extreme martial-arts competition. Unlike the World Wrestling Federation, in which the guys look like animatronic freaks, Shooto heroes are young, with beautiful, sculptured bodies and model faces. The crowd, almost everyone under 30, goes wild for the stars. There are a dozen matches in the day, and the T-shirts, with slogans like ''We Want Truth,'' sell out nightly. Shooto became a big part of the youth culture here, says Jay, the advertising guru. ''Key fashion influencers started giving apparel to the fighters, the fighters started appearing in fashion magazines, and the fashion started appearing in martial arts magazines,'' he says. ''Then the indie bands started supporting the fight scene. It's the most real thing the youth have here.''
They claim it's real. It could be real. It probably isn't real.
Unlike with the London punks and mods, or the New York rappers who so inspire dress in the streets of Japan's capital, there are no politics behind the Tokyo fashion movements. The punk movement, when it came, was only about fashion. The hip-hop movement has nothing to do with rebellion. Boystyle has nothing to do with women's rights. If you ask the girls why they're wearing it, it's because ''it's cute.'' What are all those sartorial movements without anger? Well, they're happy clothes. They're kwaii. They're divested of all of their meaning. As central as fashion is to life here, all it really says is that the person wearing it loves fashion. Even Watanabe professes distress that his spring collection of sweet florals and hippie denims was deemed comforting to the post-Sept. 11 audience. He wanted them to be judged only as the art he believes they are.
In Tokyo, fashion, after all, is used to existing without political context. There's little street crime and no visible underclass, and the only thing to rebel against is the work ethic. And the young generation has been criticized for doing just that, although their posing in the streets has become its own kind of performance art, their dress coloring the world around them and defining Japanese culture more than any other movement in the city. The image of the ''salaryman'' had no glamour and no culture, as serious as the Ko-gals were frivolous. There seemed little for the young to pursue in between.
But perhaps the weaker economy will affect that. Minoru Mori, the president of the Mori Building Company, which is creating a 54-story office building in Tokyo, with a modern art museum at the top so that culture will be the peak of the city, says that the faltering economy has ushered in a new era in Japan. An era of culture above commerce. The artist Noriyuki Tanaka once said of Japan that there is no counterculture because there is no high culture and no low culture. That may be changing.
Which could mean that fashion will soon take a place behind burgeoning arts in other mediums. Or perhaps its new visionaries, like the up-and-coming designer Jun Takahashi of Under Cover, will just take Tokyo fashion to an even higher level than it has already achieved. If there is a point higher than that.
Amy M. Spindler is the style editor of The New York Times Magazine.
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