imomus | Wear's it at?

(Photo of Blacknmate by Khanh-Linh La)

I'm not much into fashion per se -- I rushed in semi-disgust through several rooms of Viktor and Rolf at the Mori Museum last weekend to get to the Tsuyoshi Ozawa show -- but I do think the way people present and express themselves using clothes is important and inspiring.

Japanese teen street fashion, five or six years ago, was a huge inspiration to me. I bought Cutie magazine regularily and, somewhat absurdly for a man in his 30s, actually copied the haircuts, colour combinations and style clashes I saw going on in its pages. For instance, I remember being with Laila France in a photographer's studio in Berlin in 1997, leafing through Cutie (you could buy it back then at a shop on the Alte Schoenhauser Strasse), and getting the stylist to give me a copy of the 'mushroom' fringe a cute knock-kneed, pigeon-toed Japanese girl was sporting. She must have been 16; I was 37. Well, it's never too late to be starstruck. Back in 1997, Japanese girls and female British artists were the rock stars of my world, the style exemplars. How times have changed!

A quick flip through Cutie magazine today leaves me quite cold. Colour seems to have vanished from Japanese high streets. Black, grey and pink combinations are the order of the day, with lots of parallel black and white stripes, nasty pinky punky acid electric animal prints, bad 80s retro collegiate graphics, baggy outlines, trashy accessories. Think early Cindy Lauper in bangles and acid-washed denim. Yuk, yuk, yuk!

I do still want a style template, though. I want to see people dressing expressively. I want to be inspired to copy someone. Turning to comparative style observation mags like Street Magazine or Shift's Girls on the Street section, I have to admit that London and Paris are where street fashion is looking most interesting just now.

My personal style heroes at the moment are the musicians of the Shoboshobo movement. They have the best-sounding records, the best-looking sleeve designs, the best photoblogs and the best clothes of anyone I know. Here's Blacknmate about to take the stage, here's Medhi from Minifer wearing a Barbapapa T shirt (Barbapapa is where it's at, Daddy!), o.lamm about to bash someone over the head with a keyboard (nice belt, Olivier!), o.lamm on the way to rehearsal, and Noak Katoi at France Culture.

Actually, there are a couple of people in Berlin I consider the epitome of sartorial cool. Neither of them is German. Mario is one of them. He's Spanish. Nine is another. She's half French, half Japanese. Actually, when I look at what they're wearing it isn't that wonderful on its own. I don't know if I feel like copying Mario's baggy-ass jeans or Nine's Mudhoney T shirt. That's not where their soul is located, and it certainly wouldn't be where mine was if I just copied it.

No, just like o.lamm, these people have adverbial skills when it comes to clothes. It's all about how they're wearing what they're wearing. They have some kind of inner strength that shows through. What they're wearing betokens their talent, grace, and their concern with beauty. And, just as soul itself is the longing of the soul-less for redemption, so a deep concern with beauty becomes, by symbiosis, the thing it seeks.

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I was just a a ShoboShobo show last week.

Tutorial #3.

I saw Anagma and Kloma give a demonstration of what they do to a basement full of French art students.

My current favorite is my young, spry friend,

knick_knack.

Here's why:
http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=knick_knack
http://www.livejournal.com/users/knick_knack/124237.html#cutid1

I look at him and think, "son".

Oh dear, that second link looks like the revue Fischerspooner left, wisely, on the cutting room floor.

...and yet I laugh and laugh.

I find fashion to be boring - borish. Street fashion is much more exciting. When I was in Europe three years ago I was people watching left and right. The most interesting clothes were worn by the Japanese tourists.

Americans have to be the worst dressers collectively. Street fashion in this country has to be sought out, and you mainly find it in big cities (NYC especially).

I love Fruits - bought the book a couple of years ago, and was able to pick up a few copies of Kera at Tower Records. But you're right, the crazy inventiveness has gone from much of the street style, and much of it looks a little too contrived and structured now.

I seek out street fashion, but I think I have to be the most plain jane dresser. Go figure!

Ha ha. It was ALWAYS totally fake and constructed. Even the crazy Fruits and Cutie looks come from the direct following of fashion manual-type magazines. Creativity in Japan is enforced from the top-down.

You remind me of someone I know named Ian Lowe.
He's part Scottish by ancestry and is so fashion-
conscious he's quite fancy

i have some old Cutie's from a couple years back and my friends and I still take them to the hair stylist when we need a cut. I imagine we'll be doing so years from now as well!

ooh! blacknmate is fucking wonderful!!! Barbapapa is sooo cute as well! i love the theme song...

i agree with you on this fashion business..i have also lost faith in the majority of japanese street fashion magazines and the kids on the street themselves. i used to get fruits magazine and browse through it all excited cause there were sooo many ideas. so many things that inspired me. now it seems to be more designer than d.i.y...and it is totally drab and boring.

Oh, me too with the Cutie magazine. I did the same thing with Fruits magazine as well. I still buy the later from time to time because there are still ideas that turn it for me in there. Just not like before when you had to stare at every page for a good spell to fully soak in all the layers, color combinations and ideas.

I'm hopeful and optimistic however that this whole dark thing is just part of the street fashion cycle--a reaction to the gaudy and outlandish thing--that will eventually return to something more creative and inspiring--as a reaction to the staid and monochromatic look of now.

Tokyo has rarely let me down.

I agree about Fruits magazine. It was brilliant when it first came out (was that '97 or '98?) but sadly it has gone downhill in the last few years. Unfortunately the last fresh thing I've seen in this line were some Japanese girls at the Dublin airport dressed in a sort of manga-Celtic style. That's already two years ago.

Momus! Blacknmate look terrible! Like some ironic Shoreditch metal band.

To be honest, you look much scarier* in that orange hood thingy that you keep wearing.

*compliment

It's a snood, surely.

Urgh! Snood... that's the world's ugliest word, isn't it? ... Snood, Snood, Snoooooood, Ssssssnoooooood.

Didn't Beckett write a play about an old man playing with some bananas and some snoods, or am I mistaken?

Snnnooooood.

Ha ha ha!

Vaguely related to this entry is the new edition of Composite magazine, with a feature entitled Is Fashion Out of Fashion (http://compositemag.com/composite/e/e_top.html)?

Mario is a modus vivendis!

what's your favourite Barbapapa character? Mine was obviously the fluffy black one.

hi there::
actually, it's not stephane domotic who's wearing this barbapapa t-shirt::it's mehdi aka minifer aka the shoboshobo grandmaster!!

You are all lucky that you are not witnessing "fashion week" in bryant park. The streets were filled with drug addicts in very passe but flashy clothes. It was real square, man.

they don't distribute kid's wear magazine to the netherlands anymore, but now that was an inspiration.

erik

rotterdam
the netherlands

I can't stomach the 80s fashion revival. Being just old enough to remember it the first time, I associate assymetrcial blouses and big shoulder pads with the smell of department store formaldehyde, and I am rendered queasy. Downtown Toronto is an abattoire of fashion victims; if I see one more Princess Diana haircut with a black and pink handbag and stitced-up denim skirt... oooh....

The only good think about it is the checkers. I always liked checkers.

from an interview of Hedi Slimane concerning the two paragraphs starting with, "My personal style heroes..":

"For me, it's so much about the way people wear clothes, the way they behave, not so much about the clothes themselves. In France, it's called le porté. It's a very old-school way of dressing based on how the clothes fall on the body. I work on this natural level of understanding clothes. It comes from getting so into my own world and chasing my own moods. I pay attention to movement, the way the clothes translate on the body, even the way they translate to a girl."

oops, make that the last -three- paragraphs...por-tay,..

Wear's it at?

huh?...hmmm... Hurrah!

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Re: contrived

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Krapp's Last Cape

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blacknpapa::

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kids wear

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