Looking around at the big fashion drops for March is like throwing a dart at a selection of Japanese fashion magazines from the 1990s.
There was a general consensus in the industry that we were done with the ’90s and hellbent on rehashing the 2000s, but both decades have now come together to form a vague, millennial blur. It looks like we are going to be revisiting these eras for some time yet.
This manifests itself at two strata: At the lower end of the market, we have what Japanese youth are calling the “Y2K” look. It’s a hodgepodge of rehashed street fashion trends from the turn of the millennium (baggy flares, a bit of grunge and far too many zips and pockets). New generations are taking ironic joy in partying in the past. Look no further than the reboot of gyaru fashion mainstay Love Boat, which has been revived from the fashion mortuary by cheap and cheerful youth chain ANAP for a capsule collection in stores now. It is a summery burst of surfer chic with a touch of ’90s grunge gyaru culture (think perilously cropped tops for the urban hippy). With prices maxing out at ¥3,190 for a T-shirt, this is squarely targeted as an affordable buy for a new, young generation rather than the ones who first wore it around Shibuya 20 years ago.
At the other end of the spectrum are brands like Blackmeans, which turned up on an off-season Tokyo runway show in a collaboration with El ConductorH on Feb. 22. For Blackmeans, their work grows out of the ’90s street culture that design team Yujiro Komatsu and Masatomo Ariga grew up with. Here, a kind of archived authenticity is the order of the day, and with a pair of crust punk jeans coming in at ¥137,500, the youth are largely locked out and will have to rip up their own. It is worth saying that these, like everything Blackmeans touches, are crafted to perfection and built like a tank. Komatsu himself was in a punk band in the United Kingdom 30 years ago and has a deft touch for preserving that legacy while moving it forward.
Still, for all the bathing in nostalgia, it doesn’t create any new subcultures. Instead, it only wallows in memories of better times. The same can be said for the biggest drop of the month — a whole host of Final Fantasy-inspired apparel available exclusively at Shibuya's Parco department store. Over 20 brands have produced fashion-oriented work for the special fair, with enduring subcultural mainstays like Milkfed, Candy Stripper, Silas, and Angelic Pretty riffing on the series for its 35th anniversary. The fair is underway now, and is popular enough to warrant checking waiting times before you visit.
The collaborations dig deep into the 8- and 16-bit retro past, and while there are some highlights to be found, such is this focus on the first part of the franchises’ legacy that it’s easy to forget this is an ongoing series whose current designs are in touch with contemporary fashion.
The appeal of Final Fantasy unites generations, so it’s difficult to pin down exactly who exactly this focus on nostalgia is for. In that sense, Final Fantasy has joined Japanese pop culture franchises like Gundam and Nintendo’s iconic characters to become a series that doesn’t belong to a single decade. To call Final Fantasy an ’80s or ’90s series would be an insult to its enduring legacy despite those being its formative decades. And yet, the same logic doesn’t work for fashion — flared jeans will always belong to the ’70s despite them being so actively reinterpreted by designers ever since.
Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo for autumn and winter of 2023 is currently underway at the time of writing, so we might yet see more designers this spring following in the footsteps of the late, great Issey Miyake in departing with forms of the past. The challenge, however, is doing so in a way that captures an audience. Fashion students discover very quickly that the avant garde is only a sketchbook away, trying to render it in a manner that people aspire to wear is the goal. Without great innovators capable of putting on a compelling show, we seem doomed to wander in the glories of the past.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.