Urban stages: I went to Harajuku and found exactly what I was looking for
A young store worker/greeter in the main alleyway in Harajuku looks, speaks and acts the brightly colored, inexorably cheery part that people expect in Harajuku. All photos by Michael Hurt
By Michael Hurt
I recently gave an academic talk on street fashion culture at a forum in Tokyo, at Seijo University. So I leapt at the opportunity to get to know the (in)famous Harajuku and Shibuya scenes by shooting them after my presentation.
I stopped these three hairstyling/beauty students on the main Harajuku strip and posed them in front of the hip STYLENANDA facade for my “Harajuku picture.”
So I went out looking for “Harajuku.” And that’s the interesting conundrum. What the heck is Harajuku? A simple Google search of the term “Harajuku girl” tells me pretty clearly that it’s this:
These are Japanese people. Or are they?
There’s a particular look here of “Tokyo fashion” or “Japanese fashion” that the world is now familiar with, especially after Shoichi Aoki dropped the first issue of his magazine FRUiTS in 1997, which was a publishing and cultural sensation.
Everyday Japanese people, right?
And then there’s what Gwen Stefani told the world.
But here’s what I also found in Harajuku ― fashionable people, but of an unexpected kind.
A younger, stylish couple with a baby out for a mobile picnic. Daddy does collaborations with Korean fashion designers.
An older couple married for 41 years, out on a Sunday stroll.
Although these aren’t the kind of fashionable folks one might expect bearing the “Harajuku look,” they are indeed fashionable people in Harajuku, albeit walking in and out of the nearby Yoyogi Park, where the cool kids used to hang out when the FRUiTS-style fashion kids used to congregate there.
I also made a stop in equally famous Shibuya, where some of Japan’s most famous fast-fashion trend shops were located, including the world-famous Shibuya 109 building. Of course, the most Shibuya-looking girl in shooting distance with interesting attire, who also agreed to pose, turned out not to be a Japanese local, but a Hong Kong Chinese tourist only in town for a few days. But it occurred to me that one of the reasons she looked so Shibuya? -- ?indeed, standing in front of Shibuya 109 -- ?was because she might have dressed according to her idea of what would be appropriate for her? -- ?a waitress with a pretty strong brand and Instagram following? -- ?to look like when visiting Shibuya. My image of a Shibuya look simply matched with hers and we happened to meet that day on the common stage of the actual place of Shibuya 109.
Although I had been thinking about this issue of the staged nature of all “street fashion”? -- ?especially given its increasingly commercial and non-amateur manifestations -- the trip to Harajuku/Shibuya confirmed my idea that the curational staging of street fashion is most apparent after its mediation out into the world, solidification into even more concrete images, and back again, through the people who dress up and inhabit these stages, as well as the photographers who go looking for them.
It occurred to me that I had found exactly what I was looking for, and so had my most Harajuku/Shibuya-licious subjects. We had simply found each other in space that day, brought together partly by the chance that made me cross her path on that day at that particular time, along with a far grander design that went into the crafting of the stage that brought us together.
When it comes to my “street fashion” photography at Seoul Fashion Week and the fact that it (and any fashion week) has simply become a curational stage for the street fashion scene, ?it makes me think more deeply about how and why Seoul Fashion Week has become one of the hottest in the world? -- ?as regular treatment by
,
, Highsnobiety,
, and many others is obvious testament to.? ?I am inevitably led to the same conclusion I made in an earlier column here, but for different reasons?, ?that t
he Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) is indeed an “accidental wonder
” -- not just an achievement in socially aware architectural design -- as the curational stage for one of the hottest street fashion scenes on the planet now.
Regardless of the question of how “representative” Korean street fashion paepi (Korean slang portmanteau for “fashion people”) are of everyday Korean people, it begs a string of similar questions related to what we choose as representative of a culture.
Street fashion kids at Harajuku/Shibuya weren’t representative of what most Japanese people wore every day, even in the 1990s. Likewise, Seoul people are a big chunk of the Korean population but not the majority. And in Seoul, the really cool kids who populate Seoul Fashion Week aren’t, numerically speaking, the majority of people who wear clothing here. But these spectacular minorities do tell us something interesting about the places and the cultures, even if the message isn’t super simple and prima facie obvious.
So I’ll end this column by posing a final question through pictures from the curational stage of the DDP during Seoul Fashion Week. What’s going on here, in terms of what the cool kid paepi are bringing to the (re)mix?
Michael Hurt
Dr. Michael Hurt (@kuraeji on Instagram) is a photographer and professor living in Seoul. He received his doctorate from UC Berkeley's Department of Ethnic Studies and started Korea's first street fashion blog in 2006. He explores gender and fashion at The Girl Act (Instagram @girlact_official) and also writes on Visual Sociology and Cultural Studies at
.