The Ginza may be the best known of any of Tokyo's city districts. It is currently going through a rebirth as Tokyo's prime shopping district, after the economic downturn of recent times forced frugality on the big spending Japanese shoppers of the bubble economy.
The main Ginza intersection, opposite the Wako building. Even on a rainy weekday the streets are busy again.
But rebirth is not new to the Ginza, having been through it several times before, for a variety of reasons.
It is not my intention to write a piece here on the past history, reasons, inspiration or meaning behind the fashion show that has been dubbed 'Harajuku Girls' by the popular media. These are the junior high school and (mainly) high school girls who abandon their school uniforms on Sundays, exchanging them for as individual a display of eclectic fashion as can be seen anywhere in the world. So much has been written, blogged, photographically reproduced, and explained, about this phenomena that I don't have anything to add to it, philosophically.
Harajuku fashion appears to be becoming much more stylised, less eclectic. Fashion labels now, rather than home made, or at least as it was originally, assembled from found objects?
But last time I was there, in the Spring of 2005, I think I detected a shift in the way these girls were dressed. If you take a look at Shoichi Aoki's photographic essay, titled 'Fruits', which was produced from photographs taken around 1999/2000, you can see mainly very individually styled outfits produced from modified 'ordinary' clothes, hand-made outfits, bizarre ensembles produced from assembling a strange mix of second-hand pieces, and clothes made from altering traditional Japanese garments and footwear. The result was a colorful, raggedy collection of clothing that had a punky, homeless, orphan kind of feel to it.
