Fashionable clothing on young women is often seen as an indication of the state of society itself, and is hence to be celebrated or deplored. In any event, it is to be emulated until the ensemble of the week successfully adorns just everyone -- at which time the outfit is no longer fashionable.
Past fads, however, leave visible trails and these may be subsumed to indicate a history, a geological deposit, the layers of which specify something about the recent past. That is accomplished in this popularly written "greatest hits of Japanese schoolgirl culture and fashion."
From the early 1960s through the mid-'90s to the present, the iconographic outfits are illustrated and discussed. Many of us can still remember an early manifestation -- the colorful, baggy-trousered Takenokozoku kids of Harajuku (circa 1979, named after a Shibuya boutique), some 5,000 of whom gathered every Sunday to dance their lives away.