The Rising Tides of Fashion Populism - Japanese shoppers have a new confidence in their culture

Why has the fashion populism implied in the Real Clothes boom blossomed in these first few years of the 21st century? First we must recognize that Japanese consumers gained a new confidence in their own culture by the end of the bubble era in the early 1990s. After years of dutifully chasing American and European style standards out of a national inferiority complex, the then-wealthy Japanese people realized that they had worked so hard at catch-up that they had finally outdone their international contemporaries. Meanwhile, fashion styles like the Kogal/Kogyaru (think fake tan, bright color Shibuya blondes) grew out of local subcultures rooted in Tokyo rather than based on influences from overseas or dictated from an elitist media complex. When the girls from the mass Kogal movement graduated into more reasonable and socially acceptable outfits, they turned to CanCam and JJ and brought their slightly-nationalistic spirit of ‘Japan First’ into the fashion world.

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