LEXIS-NEXIS® Academic Universe-Document

LEXIS-NEXIS® Academic

March 18, 2002

SECTION: LETTER FROM TOKYO; Pg. 104

LENGTH: 5275 words

HEADLINE: SHOPPING REBELLION;
What the kids want.

BYLINE: REBECCA MEAD

BODY:
Takeshita Street, in the Harajuku district of Tokyo, is the equivalent of Eighth Street in New York: it is a narrow commercial passageway, crammed with stores selling imported Levi's, baby-doll T-shirts, and platform boots that have all the charm of medical appliances. Such attributes naturally make it a favorite resort of Japanese teen-agers, who are the most avid consumers in a country where, since the end of the Second World War and in spite of a ten-year recession, consuming is a crucial part of the national identity. On the weekends, Takeshita Street is mobbed by thousands of fashion-conscious Japanese youths: boys who parade around in slouchy hip-hop clothes, and girls who wear thrift-store-style dresses layered over bluejeans, a look that really works only if you weigh less than ninety pounds, which most of them seem to. It would be easy, while squeezing through the crowds on a Saturday afternoon, to miss a store called Brand Select Recycle, which is marked only by a blue sign pointing up a narrow staircase, painted with the names of designer labels-Under Cover, Bathing Ape, Gucci, Prada, and, spelled incorrectly, Martin Margaiela. The store is about six hundred and fifty feet square, its peeling paintwork illuminated by fluorescent light; it is crammed with rack upon rack of secondhand clothing, with hand-lettered, improbably high price tags pinned on. A black hooded sweatshirt bearing an image of Mickey Mouse holding a microphone and striking a rock-star pose, made by a company called Number Nine, sells for a hundred and twenty-eight thousand yen, which is close to a thousand dollars. A T-shirt with the same Mickey Mouse image goes for more than four hundred dollars. Even in a society as affluent as Japan, where there's no poverty to speak of, these prices are enough to make a visitor wonder whether the yen underwent a catastrophic devaluation in the time it took to climb the stairs.

A thousand-dollar secondhand sweatshirt is, however, just an expression of market forces. "Six months ago, Number Nine was not as expensive as it is now, and probably next year it will go down in price," the store's owner, Akihiko Takeuchi, explained to me when I visited in November. Takeuchi is thirty-nine years old, which, in the world of Japanese youth culture, is decidedly middle-aged. His thinning hair bears all the signs of having been barbered rather than styled; he wears loose plaid shirts and gray flannel trousers and black sneakers, and even though he gets his shirts and sneakers from Hermes and his pants from Comme des Garcons, he wears them with all the aplomb of a man who shops at Sears.

He doesn't set most of the prices at Brand Select Recycle, he explained to me; they are established by the individual consigners of the items, who pay him a commission. By watching the buying and selling practices of his customers, who are mostly high-school and college students, Takeuchi has an unrivalled perspective on the fluctuating indices of Tokyo street fashion: the week I visited, for example, he'd found that boys were seeking out items from Head Porter, a Japanese luggage brand whose nylon snakeskin-patterned wallet was selling for a hundred and fifty dollars-twice its original retail value. I found sixteen-year-old Koudai Matsuhita, who was wearing a school blazer and had shaved eyebrows, intently pawing through the Number Nine Mickey Mouse T-shirts; he explained that they had a "rock-and-roll feel" that he liked. Another hot label was Bathing Ape, a Japanese skatewear brand whose signature is a distinctive camouflage pattern; a Bathing Ape nylon blouson jacket was selling for ninety-eight thousand yen, or seven hundred and forty dollars.

But Takeuchi explained that his customers weren't simply slaves to a label: he showed me a Bathing Ape chunky knit cardigan, its wooden buttons carved with images of apes; the style hadn't taken off when it was first released to stores, and now Brand Select Recycle was offering it for just a hundred and ninety-four dollars, much less than its original cost. And a mainstream designer label like Comme des Garcons had little heat in the Brand Select Recycle marketplace; you could buy a secondhand Comme shirt for fifty-eight hundred yen, or forty-four dollars. Even after years of watching his clients' purchasing patterns, Takeuchi said that he was still unable to predict when one brand would surge in popularity while another fell out of favor. "It's kind of like the image of the capitalist economy-the more desired it is, the more expensive it is," he said. "It cannot be accounted for rationally."

What is known in Japan as the bubble economy-the economic boom of the nineteen-eighties-provoked massive speculation in the markets and in real estate, and Japan is still experiencing the prolonged, low-level hangover that has persisted since the bubble burst, in the early nineteen-nineties. But you wouldn't know that the country is in recession from the way young people spend money. Because of the recession and the inflation of real-estate prices, many young Japanese continue to live at home well into their twenties; buying clothes is one of the things that living rent-free in a small apartment with your parents permits you to do. One young Japanese curator, Koji Yoshida, explained to me that the phenomenon of the free-spending Japanese youth is a product of paternal guilt. "In Japanese families, the ascendance of the father is the usual phenomenon, but after the bubble burst fathers lost their rights and respect," he told me over coffee one afternoon. "Fathers had to appease their children by giving them lots of gifts and money." Whether or not you accept the idea that Japan's youth-oriented consumer culture is sustained by a kind of commercial Oedipal agon, the swarming shopping districts of Tokyo on weekends do resemble a world in which adults have been more or less dispensed with. It's as if the streets had been cleansed of anyone over the age of thirty.

The crucial element that is being sold at shops like Brand Select Recycle is scarcity. In spite of the parallels with the financial markets, Takeuchi's customers aren't buying four-hundred-dollar T-shirts as investments. They want to be seen wearing an item that hardly anyone else owns but that everyone will recognize as exclusive. Scarcity, of course, is an integral part of high fashion, but it often has a basis in the practical difficulties of supplying consumer demand: customers will wait months for a Birkin bag from Hermes not just because the company knows the marketing value of making a product hard to get but because the bags are painstakingly created by a small number of highly skilled craftsmen.

In Japan, however, all the skill goes into engineering the scarcity: designers produce only limited editions of T-shirts or jackets, items of the sort that can be easily mass-produced. This means that shopping in Tokyo feels a little like a bizarre parody of grocery shopping in Soviet Russia: you might want to buy a bunch of bananas, but the only thing for sale is pickled cabbage. At the Bathing Ape store just off Takeshita Street, where T-shirts are displayed like prints in an art gallery, sandwiched between sheets of clear plastic, half the display cases are empty, since the company might produce only five hundred of any particular T-shirt design. At certain popular stores, like Silas & Maria, a British skatewear brand, would-be shoppers are required to wait in orderly file in the street, as if they were on a bread line, before being permitted, twenty or so at a time, to rush in and scour the sparsely stocked shelves for any new merchandise. The next twenty customers aren't allowed in until the last of the previous group has left and meticulous sales assistants have restored the shelves and racks to their unmolested condition. The whole cycle can take half an hour or more. This is what Japanese teen-agers do for fun.

One of the striking things about spending any time among fashion-conscious Japanese kids is how utterly nerdy they can be in their pursuit of cool. In Europe and the United States fashion falls decisively into the category of the frivolous and playful; in Japan the right T-shirt or cap is sought with a kind of dogged intensity, and not just by a fringe group of fanatics. Japanese boys in particular seem to treat fashion in a manner appropriate to stamp collecting or train spotting. Entire magazines are dedicated to the subject of teen boys' haircuts. The look of the moment is to have it bleached to a coppery color, cut into spiky peaks on top, and left shaggy around the ears and neck. The style is called "the wolf," although the boys look less lupine than feline, as if they were chorus members from "Cats."

"What looks dishevelled is highly calculated," John Jay, a creative director of the Tokyo branch of Wieden & Kennedy, the advertising company, explained to me when I visited his company's penthouse office. Jay's main client is Nike. "There is a word here, otaku, which is about being focussed and almost obsessed with something you like," he said. Otaku originally referred to a category of young Japanese men who were fixated on manga-the distinctive cartoon art that is popular reading material for adults in Japan. The word is now used to describe someone with a fanatical interest in computers or fashion. One designer, Hiroaki Ohya, drew upon the Japanese obsession with technology to produce, in his spring collection, a sporty woman's blouse that was shaped like a computer, with a screen printed on the breast, a keyboard at the waist, and a curved panel on the back which bulged out, like an iMac.

In the past two decades, Japan's contribution to fashion has been twofold. In the early eighties, a trio of designers-Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, and Rei Kawakubo, of Comme des Garcons-started teaching Japanese and Westerners alike that wearing layers of oddly shaped black garments could be terrifically stylish. In the late eighties and into the nineties, it was Japanese consumers who drove an international mania for luxury brands that resulted in all kinds of musty old labels-the Burberry raincoat, the Louis Vuitton suitcase-being dragged out of mothballs and transformed, improbably, into trendy items. Those two phenomena continue: in 2001, the Japan market accounted for fifteen per cent of all sales for the LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton group, and the opening of a huge Louis Vuitton store in the Ginza district of Tokyo in late 2000 drew four thousand customers a day. No younger Japanese designers have challenged the creative dominance of the big three; new designers who have emerged, such as Junya Watanabe, have done so as proteges of the established designers, not as their revolutionary offspring.

Over the last ten years, though, Tokyo has also witnessed a metastasis of street fashion: you see styles that originated in the West, often associated with a particular musical category such as punk, or rap, or hip-hop. Hip-hop style is as prevalent among Japanese boys as it is on the C train, although in the absence of an actual ghetto, where they might hone their look, Japanese boys turn to hip-hop life-style stores such as Real Mad Hectic, where they can not only buy work boots and triple-fat goose-down jackets of the sort favored by American rap fans but also watch a videotape of highlights from the N.B.A. on a flat-screen TV while nodding along to the Jay-Z album playing over the sound system.

Many of the most popular Japanese brands aren't available in Europe or the United States, because there's little economic incentive for the designers to undergo an expensive expansion into foreign markets when the domestic market is so strong and so easily accommodated. (Bathing Ape, for example, has only one store outside Japan, in Hong Kong. You need an appointment to get in.) Because the Japanese are fanatical about fashion in the way that the Brazilians are about soccer or the Germans are about cleanliness, walking around Tokyo can feel like being trapped in an endless Halloween party where everyone but you has come as a member of the Beastie Boys, the Cure, or TLC.

The past couple of years saw the flourishing of the yamamba, or "mountain witch" girls, who tanned their skin dark brown, teased their bleached hair into silver snarls, and wore pale pearlized lipstick of the sort not seen since Dusty Springfield; they appear mostly to have retreated back to the mountains, though there are still a substantial number of tanned-and-blonded girls to be seen who model themselves on the look of Ayumi Hamazaki, one of Japan's several Britney Spears derivatives. These girls can usually be found hanging around a store called Egoist, which for a time was so trendy that the salesgirls themselves became icons. They appeared in the company's catalogue, and some of them established their own Web sites to dispense advice to their followers. One of the Egoist girls, a twenty-three-year-old named Shizue Nohara, told me that she'd worked at Egoist for three years. "I like to be the leader and have other people follow me," she said. She was dressed in a gray rabbit-fur jacket and bluejeans, Egoist's theme for the season being "Rodeo Girl." The previous season had been "Sexy and Boyish."

Another recent trend was wearing boots with twenty-centimeter platform heels. There have been at least five reported shoe-related fatalities, one involving a twenty-five-year-old who died after tumbling off her own footwear, and another who lost control of her car's brake pedal and crashed into a pole, thereby killing her passenger. Among the teen fashion avant-garde, platforms are over: one day in the shopping district of Shibuya I met two fashion students from Bunka, Tokyo's equivalent of F.I.T., who were both wearing white lace dresses layered over pants, and crocheted shawls tied around their shoulders, granny style, and who assured me that "comfortable shoes" were now in vogue. Given that they were wearing gold-and-silver ballet slippers in heavy rain, though, "comfort" was clearly a relative term.

For a Westerner, distinguishing between clothes and costume can be difficult. Every weekend, on a bridge near the train station in the Harajuku district, dozens of suburban teen-age girls and a few boys stand around all day wearing gothic drag: black vinyl kimonos or full punk bondage gear, with whitened faces and blackened eyes. The kids on the bridge are misfits of a sort. There was one unusually fat girl with a white-painted face, wearing her school uniform: short skirt, thick cream-colored leg warmers rumpled around her ankles like the skin of an ancient elephant. (Many Japanese girls wear their school uniforms even when they're not in school. There is, not coincidentally, a Japanese word, rorikon, a loose transliteration of "Lolita complex," referring to the fondness among Japanese men for little girls.) "I come here to have a relationship with other people and to see my friends," she told me, and it was hard to imagine another fashion scene into which someone of her size would fit.

And yet their rebellion is a kind of performance which is grounded on a thriving commercial foundation: entire stores are devoted to selling the "gothic Lolita" outfits; and the inspiration for most of their looks comes from what are known as bijuaru-kei rokku bando, "visual-type rock bands": groups like Dir En Grey, five heavily made-up young Japanese men whose music is little more than an excuse for their often changing costumes, which can be ordered from special catalogues. Lately, those costumes have included white doctors' coats spattered with fake bloodstains, worn with bloodstained bandages wrapped around the wrist. As a result, the bridge at Harajuku looks like an emergency medical site staffed by the suicidal, bastard offspring of Boy George.

Given the influence of Western street style, Japanese boys have to work hard to create an identity that feels original. It's significant, in this regard, that the most admired figures in Japanese youth culture are not, as they might be in the United States, musicians or actors or athletes but d.j.s. John Jay, the Weiden & Kennedy ad man, told me, "D.j.s represent the ability to create something yourself. They're very international. Japanese have a place on the international d.j. circuit. They give Japanese youth a sense of self-confidence, and they represent something that doesn't have to apologize for the past."

A number of the most popular streetwear labels in Japan are created by former d.j.s, who produce their collections much as they produce records, by taking bits of inspiration from fashions that already exist, repackaging them, and then selling them in a limited edition. The most celebrated d.j.-turned-designer in Tokyo is a thirty-seven-year-old named Hiroshi Fujiwara, whose name is spoken with something like reverence by Japanese fashion sorts. I first heard of him from the owner of Brand Select Recycle, who told me that the designers of Bathing Ape and Number Nine were "disciples" of Fujiwara.

Fujiwara travelled to clubs like Heaven in London or Paradise Garage in New York in the eighties, and then introduced Japanese audiences not just to Western club music but to fashion labels like Stussy. These days, he helps Nike out with marketing ideas (he prefers not to call himself a consultant, just a friend, but he is the kind of friend who has flown in the company's private jet) and writes a column of fashion recommendations for a magazine called Men's Non-No. Fujiwara recently held an Internet auction of his possessions, in which a nylon jacket with a fabric insert on one sleeve, a piece he had both designed and worn, sold for 1.1 million yen, nearly eight and a half thousand dollars.

"Ten years ago, nobody thought about making their own clothes," Fujiwara told me, when I visited him in his office above the Nike store. "But you don't need a fashion background to make T-shirts. I would work with designers and say, 'I want a zipper here,' and they would say, 'You can't have a zipper here,' and we would have big fights." He says that one of his favorite new brands is a label called Unsqueaky, which a former salesgirl from Ready Made, a store he used to run, has started. "We wanted to call it Squeaky," Fujiwara said, "but someone already had that name, so we called it Unsqueaky."

For Japanese girls, the main fashion choice is between being kawaii, or cute-which means you wear girlish pastel-colored clothes that might have pictures of furry animals on them, and sometimes you actually carry a toy furry animal with you-and bodikon, or body-conscious-which means you dress like a cross between Lil' Kim and a manga character. Japanese concepts of female sexiness are about as easy for an outsider to decipher as a Japanese newspaper, but they go something like this: men find kawaii girls sexy because they're pretty and decorative and unthreatening, but a girl can't be too committed to the kawaii aesthetic because men will think she's a freak. In some cases, the men will be right about this: at a store called Milk, which didn't seem to sell anything without pink pom-poms attached, I met a young woman who had her hair in two bunches high on her head, and was wearing a short, white fake-fur coat with teddy-bear faces appliqued onto the pockets and matching teddy bears on a scarf around her neck, and who stood pigeon-toed with her belly sticking out, like a preschooler. She said that her boyfriend had been embarrassed to be seen with her at first, but he'd got used to it. She was thirty-one years old.

The cute look is said to signify an assertion of independence on the part of the young women who adopt it, since, rather than simply putting on an ensemble presented to them by a designer, they are creating their own whimsical outfits and giving their inventiveness free rein. There's a popular magazine in Japan called Cutie, which offers hints on how to make one's person and environment more cute: a recent feature suggests sticking red heart-shaped cutouts all over your toilet seat, and coating all but the screen of your television set with a layer of white, furry fabric.

Confusingly enough, the bodikon look, which is all skimpy skirts and plunging necklines and high-heeled boots and other signifiers of hooker wear, is also understood to be an assertion of female independence. "Body-consciousness" is associated in the Japanese imagination with black women; and black culture is, among Japanese youth, taken to represent a kind of strength and sexuality, in a manner that would make an American reach for the sensitivity-training manual. Thus you find stores like Shoop, a boutique in a department store called 109 Building, where, as well as buying fake dreadlocks, girls can purchase what are known as "B-style" clothes: form-fitting dresses with athletic stripes down the side seams, and jackets bearing the slogan, in English, "Strong Black Woman" or "Black For Life." One day I met Kaori Ohta, a nineteen-year-old high-school student who was shopping at Shoop. She wore a fitted denim jacket, a short denim skirt, and high heels, had bronzed skin, and wore a long auburn wig. She'd been black for about three months, she explained; prior to that she'd been kawaii, but had decided that the bodikon look was a more appropriate expression of her strength and sexiness. However, she explained, expressing her sexiness did not amount to being a sex object. "I don't have a boyfriend, but if I did he would have to appreciate me for who I am inside, for my soul," she told me, batting her eyelashes. Ohta hoped to become a psychologist when she finished school.

Given the exaggerated femininity of girls' fashion in Japan, you might imagine that the country is being swept with a wave of ironic, post-feminist Girl Power. In Japan, though, feminism is still a new idea. It was only sixteen years ago that women were granted equal rights in the workplace, and young women who wish to have a serious career still find that acquiring a husband, not to mention having a child, can be a quick route to professional decline.

A popular figure among wouldbe unconventional Japanese girls is a twenty-seven-year-old photographer named Hiromix, who became famous for pioneering what is known as "girls' photography," images of herself and her friends hanging out. I visited Hiromix in her studio and listened to her views on Japanese gender relations, which were very bleak. "Almost all Japanese men suffer from a Lolita complex," she said. "Basically, Japanese guys feel they are threatened by these capable women, and would like them to be a little more stupid." Girls capitulated to boys by choosing cuteness over beauty, she said. "Beauty indicates a distance which is not reachable, whereas something cute is something that is accessible."

The Japanese tendency to detach style from content can be perplexing to an outsider: the kids hanging out on the Harajuku bridge might resemble the British punks who loitered on the King's Road twenty-five years ago, but rather than sniffing glue and snarling at passersby the Tokyo punks are polite and accommodating, happily posing for the tourists and doing nothing even as self-destructive as smoking a cigarette.

But local observers will explain that, although the semiotics are different from those of the West, Japanese youth fashion is not without meaning. Masanobu Sugatsuke, who is the editor of Composite, a fashion-and-culture magazine, said he believes that the fact that Japan is essentially a classless society means that young people have no way to distinguish themselves from one another except by adopting Western-derived tribal identities-surfer, skater, biker, punk, raver-even if they've never been near a surfboard in their lives. These outfits are, however, an expression of an authentic Japanese experience: that of belonging to a society that until recently was extremely ordered and disciplined, but which, over the past decade, has grown more uncertain and unpredictable. Rather than becoming company workers like their fathers, young Japanese people are increasingly becoming what are known as furita, people who work part-time and without job security, either because they choose to remain independent or because companies aren't hiring permanent staff workers.

"Japanese people don't want to be growing up so quickly," Sugatsuke told me. "They would like to stay young mentally and socially." In Japan, living at home with your parents and going shopping every weekend is a form of rebellion. Outsiders have described this devotion to fashion as self-indulgent and amoral; Oliviero Toscani, the former creative director of Benetton, told the Asahi Shimbun a few years ago that the girls who gathered in Harajuku every weekend in their oversized romper-room dresses and their silly shoes and their weird makeup were "tragic angels," living "the only existence in the world that is alien to the problems of the contemporary world, such as poverty, war, class discrimination, or joblessness." Toscani's view of the flawed youth of Tokyo did not, however, prevent Benetton from using the Harajuku girls in a worldwide advertising campaign.

It's not quite true to say that Japanese fashion exists without any view of the wider world or a political consciousness; it's just that the consciousness expressed is peculiarly Japanese. A designer who goes by the name Nakagawa Sochi, whose brand is called 20471120, is known for clothes that explicitly respond to Tokyo's overwhelming consumer culture. I met Nakagawa late one evening in a bar-he showed up with his brother and a friend, and, over several beers, he explained the epiphany he had undergone when he moved to Tokyo from Osaka. "Tokyo is free, but you don't have freedom here," he said. He is thirty-four, has spiky hair, and was wearing a Yankees baseball shirt. "When I came here, I found I couldn't schedule my time properly. There were all these cable television channels, and so I would watch television all the time. Even when there was a program I wanted to watch, I would get distracted by the other channels and miss the program I intended to see. Of course it is capitalism: when there are demands there are supplies to meet them. But in Tokyo we have too many supplies." From this insight, Nakagawa created the Tokyo Recycle Project, in which he proposes that fashion followers, rather than buying a new item, bring him their old clothes, which he will recycle into a new garment. It's as much an art project as it is a commercial fashion enterprise, and his work has been showcased at P. S. 1 in New York. The recycled item that Nakagawa shows in his publicity material-a baseball jacket which has been turned into a pair of pants, its sleeves having become below-the-knee pantaloons and its front having been transformed into what looks like a very sturdy pair of felt underwear-seems hardly likely to take off on the high-street level, even in Tokyo.

Other Japanese designers address international affairs, including Kosuke Tsumura, the creator of a line called Final Home. For the past few years, a mainstay of the Final Home collection has been a long coat made from transparent nylon which looks like a quilted down coat with all the down removed. The coat is designed to serve as a final home in the case of a natural or man-made disaster, Tsumura explained to me when I went to his studio, in a far-flung commercial district of Tokyo. For warmth, you can stuff its many pockets with newspapers, or with the floppy nylon teddy bears which Final Home also sells.

"Each customer customizes the number of bears, according to the weather," Tsumura told me. "In my own coat, I wear maybe ten bears. And if you have children, they can also play with the bears and not be scared of the disaster." After the Kobe earthquake, Tsumura sent ten of his coats to the disaster-relief efforts. When I saw him in November he was contemplating making a coat-and-bear donation to the Afghan refugees. Another item available from the Final Home store is a peculiar toy machine gun, made from floppy stuffed nylon. "It is a criticism of war, because the gun is not usable," Tsumura told me. "It is an expression of a yearning for peace."

Pacifist appropriations of militaristic chic were everywhere in Tokyo this fall, as if fashion designers had anticipated what turned out to be a widespread Japanese unease with the American war in Afghanistan. At the stores of Under Cover, another of Tokyo's trendiest brands, customers could buy a brightly patterned umbrella with a machine-gun-shaped handle, and the centerpiece of Under Cover's fall collection for women was a dramatic ball gown made from camouflage material; on the bodice, hundreds of large, pink rhinestones had been appliqued. "The message is antiwar," the label's designer, Jun Takahashi, told me. "Of course, if your clothes are covered with jewels you can't go to war."

Takahashi works in a recently-constructed studio, a hangarlike space with exposed-brick walls; there is a cozy arrangement of Eames chairs and other modern furniture, and, custom-built into the panels of three desks at which Takahashi and his colleagues sit, oversized lettering reading, in English, "Fuck the Design." Takahashi is thirty-two, and when I visited he was wearing a baggy gray-and-black sweater, messed-up combat pants, a denim worker's cap, and fabric sneakers covered with images of hamburgers with eyes. Of all the young designers currently working in Tokyo, Takahashi is the one thought most likely to succeed on the international stage, thanks to his ability to blend the energy of contemporary Tokyo street fashion with the conceptual high-fashion artistry of Comme des Garcons or Yohji Yamamoto. Takahashi is an acolyte of Rei Kawakubo's, who says of him, "I like his attitude, his politeness, his rebel spirit, and the fact that he is always looking for new and strong ways of doing things, like me." Kawakubo and Takahashi are collaborating for the first time on a line for a new store which will open in Tokyo later this month.

Takahashi's latest collection was entitled "The Illusion of Haze," and consisted of a series of ruffled and embroidered dresses and blouses in tulle and floral cotton prints, and carefully tailored jackets and pants in pastel colors; a layer of black gauze netting had been artfully sewn or stapled over each garment, so that the flounces beneath were interestingly squashed, the sunny innocence of their contours rendered slightly menacing. The collection, which was generally considered the highlight of last November's Tokyo fashion shows, was, Takahashi explained, a critique of "cute" style.

For his part, Takahashi professes not to understand what drives otaku fashion followers to pay four hundred dollars for his T-shirts and those of the other young designers. "It's a very Japanese phenomenon," he said, shaking his head. "Japanese people read magazines as their bibles, and when they see images in them they have to have them and will pay anything. Generally, Japanese people can't make up their own minds and have to have an example to follow." Takahashi will be offering something new for young consumers to become fanatical about, when he opens a new Under Cover store in which he intends to sell one-of-a-kind, hand-sewn items. "I want to communicate with the customers with a kind of warm feeling," he said. The prices these clothes will fetch if they ever make it to the racks of Brand Select Recycle just don't bear thinking about. (c)

LOAD-DATE: March 19, 2002