Abstract
Yuniya Kawamura, a sociologist of fashion at New York University’s Fashion Institute of Technology, sets out to fill voids she perceives in subcultural and fashion studies by documenting youth fashion subcultures in Tokyo. These include Gyaru (Gal), Lolita, Age-jo, Mori Girl, and Cosplay. As a student of fashion, she succeeds admirably, documenting not only major styles and variations but how high-school and college age urban Japanese women not only consume but create, model, popularize, and commercialize non-mainstream fashion.
Having observed the Japanese youth fashion scene over more than ten years and interviewed participants at every level, Kawamura suggests that many of the fashion subcultures are not only well-differentiated but a rare example of the success of “bubble-up” fashion economics, where tastes and styles developed and sustained directly by young people have propelled massive department stores and fashion districts to great success even in the midst of widespread stagnation or collapse in Japanese retail and high fashion industries.
Describing fashion subcultures, however, is not the work’s only contribution. Kawamura also considers how each subculture has spread and/or fractured, taking into account not only how members perceive it but the role of institutional support (such as anchor stores and specialized fashion magazines) in expanding their scope. To her credit, she recognizes differences in both the general salience of subcultural expression for participants and the desire of certain groups to remain marginal.
Instead, she prefers to focus on the deprofessionalization of and the recent global spread of elements such as Lolita and Cosplay. If any portion of the work is thin, it is this synthetic analysis. While it draws appropriately on Goffman, Simmel, and other major theorists at times and integrates comparisons with British subcultural studies, there simply is not enough space reserved after her descriptive work to develop fully its sociological implications.
Nonetheless, Fashioning Japanese Subcultures is an important first effort toward moving subcultural studies beyond a strictly Western orientation and understanding the variety of ways in which Japanese youth have responded to domestic and global economic downturns. The book reads well and could be used with undergraduates to complement other texts in the sociology of fashion and subculture. It leaves one wanting more, but perhaps that is exactly what it should accomplish as an initial foray into both non-Western and female-dominated subcultures.