Nobody else knows how to do anything

[imomus]

Land of the rising fun is a travel article in The Guardian this morning in which writer Ben Anderson raves about his first visit to Tokyo. He's impressed by the city's chic fashion stores, luxurious hotels and delicious restaurants. But, more than that, he likes its relative equality, and its sheer good nature:

"Most of Tokyo looks like the posh part of any other city. I didn't see an area that looked like it needed a good clean, let alone a slum, which is some achievement for one of the most populated cities on the planet... I experienced so much goodwill in Japan I'm sure it was genuine. Porters refused tips and a taxi driver turned the meter off when roadworks slowed us down."



To a London resident, these are indeed shocking things to discover. And, being British, Ben doesn't take long to turn his enthusiasm about Tokyo into reproaches against his motherland: "I came to see Tokyo in the same way as I saw the b Akasaka: a huge playground of such bright ideas and fantastic design that I barely noticed how cramped it could be. I was too busy being amazed and thinking "why haven't we got these? Why haven't we thought of this?!"

"The trip made such an impression on me," Ben concludes, "that I've developed a prejudice in favour of anything that comes from Japan. I've even had the urge to go up to Japanese people on the streets of London and say, "I know, I've been there. No one else knows how to do anything."

I must say that this was exactly my feeling after my first couple of trips to Tokyo. I could no longer stand London's brown buildings and grey sky, its hostile, arrogant, competitive, snottily class-obsessed citizens.

It's interesting, though, to wonder whether approval of one country has to be disapproval of another. And which other? It seemed natural for me to compare Tokyo to London, since I've spent more time in London than any other city (13 years, in total). If not London, the obvious comparison for me is New York. I rarely compare Tokyo with Paris, though. And actually, I'm not quite sure I could bring a clear winner out of the comparison. It's apples and oranges. One doesn't stand as a living reproach to the other; they both do what they do.



What about people? Do we implicitly deride "ordinary" people when we approve of, for instance, the eccentrics featured in street fashion magazines like Street, FRUiTS and Tune? (Photos here show some of the latest pages in all three of these magazines.)

I think there is an element of that going on, even if it's only a self-reproach directed against our own lack of daring. If these magazines are utopian, representing a world of peer-endorsed individuality ("I don't know what it means to you," the snapped snappy dressers seem to say, "but the other stall-holders at Camden Market seem to understand where I'm coming from"), they're also satirical. They mock the dull, if only by unspoken extension. But which dull? Certainly not the homeless, because several bums and down-and-outs feature in these shots. And not the old, either, because there are some oldies here too (I'm one!). People who buy clothes at The Gap? Office workers? The readers of more authoritarian, blingy, top-down, mainstream fashion mags?



Like Ben Anderson, I'm inclined, flipping through Street, to ask "Why don't we have this?" Why do I have to look at a Japanese magazine to see how the most interesting-looking people in London are dressing? Then, of course, I remember that Shoichi Aoki's template for these three magazines is a British one: Terry Jones's original idea for i-D magazine, based on the punk grassroots, DIY ethic, another London invention.

And I suppose that's why we choose certain cities, and not others, to be specifically reproached by the cities we love. It's as if we're saying: "Look, London, you claim to have invented this, so how come Tokyo does it better now? You're looking bad by your own standards."

Comments

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

Have you come across the New York blog http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/ yet? I find myself checking it out each day - and often enjoying it - but it's far more hierarchical, 'fashion' focused and conformist than the examples you quote from London and Japan.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen it before, but based on a glance it seems oddly contradictory: these are informal street snaps of power brokers and insiders from the top-down Western fashion industry. "Love your pattern-matched collar and tie combo, Hamish Bowles!" and so on. As such, it's like a blog made by fawning paparazzi who'd do better, in my view, to turn away from the rich, the famous and the powerful and discover... the individual. The kids are doing it for themselves, and coming up with much better stuff, much cheaper.

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

Hence my 'hierarchical' comment. Perhaps the looking to the rich, the famous and the powerful for ideas is a very New York phenomenon (not that London is immune to that)?

There are individuals there - kids on the street making unusual choices and combinations with thrift store finds and carefully selected items from H&M etc.

I think that the particular characteristic of the blog is that, despite the presence of 'ordinary' people one is never far away from an idea of aspiration. Everything looks up towards the look (and labels) of "power brokers and insiders from the top-down Western fashion industry."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes. And, you know, I've had dinner with Hamish Bowles and he's a nice enough man, but to be honest I find my penniless young art student friends a lot more stylish and creative. I'd never copy Hamish, but I'd copy them. For me, that's aspiration.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(But then I'm the sort of person who always likes the "before" pictures in cosmetics adverts better than the "after" ones, or thinks that the homeless bum thrown out of the fashion show in some Hollywood comedy is much better dressed than anyone inside the tent.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

(And it's worth saying that two of the people featured in Street and Tune this month actually are homeless people. You can see them on this page: the Berlin alcoholic and the old Japanese man who looks like Moondog.)

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

There is a wonderful piece by Michael Bracewell in this month's Wire magazine talking about the performances of Lindsay Kemp's Flowers at the Roundhouse in 1977. While it starts with the exoticism of the performance it peaks with its description of the audience.

"I remember scruitinising the audience and seeing some fantastically cool looking people: boys dressed in beautifully cut, second-hand suits that dated, by appearance, from the 1920s; their hair very short and slicked back with pomade; one wearing brass framed spectacles. Young women like characters from one of Colette's reminiscences of Paris in the 1910s: black sheath dresses, veils, cigarette holders, dark blue celluloid glasses...

To my ravenous awe, as one who had made the epic journey from the outer suburbs, and had little idea of how he would return thence, should the show run late, these creatures of the night were the last word in glamour; the inhabitants, it seemed, of a self-created aristocracy ('Thems', to use a Peter York term from 1976 denoting street aesthetes), their image describing nostalgia for archaic visions of modernity."

I remember these people, aped them (or at least was inspired by some of them) and had forgotten about it all for a while. Wonder what happened to them all. They weren't at all retro, they were similar to some of the people who turned up later at Bowery's Taboo - willing to quote from all eras to produce a very personal take on the present. I like self-created aristocrats - a status conferred through aesthetic choices rather than lineage - far better than aristocrats.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I used to knock around with Bracewell a bit in the late 80s. In fact, he may even have been at that dinner with Hamish Bowles. My song "The New Decameron" is a tribute to him, in fact. I half like what he says in your quote, but "a self-created aristocracy" is still a bit embarrassing if it looks like the cast for an amateur production of "Brideshead Revisited". I'm more into the idea of Trampocracy. In fact, if this magazine existed, I'd probably buy it:



The closest thing is probably Tibor Kalman's brilliant book Unfashion (http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=17-0810945002-0).

tramp

[(Anonymous)]

Somehow I don't think I'll be photographing any people
at the soup kitchen this week - too busy washing up from
a place setting for 300. I hope these folk were compensated
at the going rate for number of column inches they're filling.

Re: tramp

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It would be a good idea to have a fashion magazine featuring homeless people that only homeless people could sell, though, wouldn't it? I'd buy it.

Re: tramp

[akabe.livejournal.com]

there is actually a small one-man kind of magazine in japan that does that. quite irregular. can`t recall the name now

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

Didn't take 'self-created aristocracy' to mean that they were trying to look like faux aristocrats, more as a self-licensing elite.

As for their style - think it owed more to Biba than Brideshead. Even if they were trying to look like fake-aristos -rather than wierd personal takes on citizens of Weimar Germany, Bowie-in-Berlin, 20s jazzers, and 30s Hollywood stars, which is how I remember them - then I think there is a difference between trying to look like someone from Brideshead long before it was screened and trying to look like it after!

To be fair to The Sartorialist he runs regular features on 'old man style', workwear etc and though most of the comments about him are pretty fair there is more to him than just a fashion name check.

photos of homeless people

[metatherian.livejournal.com]

I thought you might find interest in these:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stoneth/