Introduction
A plastic and free-floating culture developed in Japan during its economic miracle from the 1960’s to the early 1990’s leading to the transformation of traditional gender norms, development of leftist thought and the birth of a new generation of avant garde artists that challenged the hegemonic culture of Japan. Young leftists around the country felt a lack of understanding of the self after absolute failure to stop the 1960 Security Treaty with the United States and failed student protests for “university struggles”[1] nationwide in 1968. At the center of innovative thought and political reformation in Tokyo during the 1960’s, Harajuku lent itself as a hub for artists, designers, graphic designers, models and families of the US Military that occupied Japan. The creatives that worked and lived in Harajuku at this time and were greatly impacted by the political scene of the post war era.
From this well of innovation came designer Rei Kawakubo, the most important figure in revolutionizing how the West thought about the body and gender in its relation to the clothes and dress. Up until her first show in Fall/Winter 1981 Paris fashion week, western fashion objectified women, ornamented them and made clothes for a body ideal that is medically impossible. Kawakubo broke barrier after barrier in the fashion industry in France. By evoking feelings of “otherness” and the “abject[2]” her message and ideology spread and landed back in Japan by promoting the identity of Comme des Garcons as a brand through “good mood” advertising[3]. As a byproduct of post-modernism and Japanese identity politics, Kawakubo created her own cultural and social spaces that provide a psychological visual essay of one’s sense of place in society. The vast influence of Kawakubo, starting in Harajuku then moving to Paris, is embedded in the minds and creations of all designers and creatives in Japan forevermore.
After Kawakubo and her brand Comme des Garcons became a household name in the early 1980’s through French fashion magazines like Vogue, designers and creatives in Japan took it into their own hands to reshape how the identity of their buyers would subvert and morph Japanese culture. The Japanese creatives meshed together the grotesque and the cute into Lolita fashion and Shojo identity[4] to reshape femininity in a culture where women were traditionally either “mothers or whores.”
In this Scalar digital exhibit, I explore how designers and creatives in Japan from the 1980’s to 2000 used Rei Kawakubo and Comme des Garcons' ideologies of business and fashion through an abject Identity to build their own fashion scenes in Tokyo.
[1] “Professor Aoki When He Was Interested in Dynamic Processes in the Market Economy | SpringerLink,” accessed November 2, 2021, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40844-017-0083-4.
[2] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (Columbia University Press, 1982).
[3] Joseph P. Bernt et al., “Media Report to Women: Media Report to Women” 37, no. 3 (01 2009), https://jstor.org/stable/10.2307/community.28040749. Pg. 12
[4] Jane Mai and An Nguygen, So Pretty, Very Rotten (Koyoma Press, 2017).