Week 7 - Japanese Teens as Producers of Street Fashion

Week 7
Japanese Teens as Producers of Street Fashion
Magnolia Garcia





I was quite surprised to find out just how influential the teens of Japan are on the country’s fashion trends. One would think that such trends are based off of the influences of high-end designers, but in this case, teens are the designers--where “anyone with great ideas is in the position to produce and disseminate fashion.” Reading of this made me a bit jealous, because I’ve always had a small dream, in the back of my mind, that I would someday play a part in fashion. To hear that untrained teenagers are being hired as designers is my dream come true.

I was also intrigued to find that these roles as influencers and designers were assigned to teenagers as a result of Japan’s social and economic hardships during their longest recession. The teens were “in search of their identity and a community where they feel that they are accepted,” and the rest of Japan paid attention to that. I was previously taught that countries in the East were very traditional and family-oriented, as opposed to focusing on the self and individuality. It appears, however, that Japan might be deviating from this lifestyle, in some ways, given that “Fashion expresses the prevailing ideology of society, and these teens see  the assertion of individual identity as more important and  meaningful than that of group identity, which used to be the key concept in Japanese culture.”