Trend Tracking

Just as we can examine how society’s obsession with certain individuals indicates ever-changing and ever-dying social and political values, so can our study of a seemingly trivial and meaningless trend.

The lifetime of a fashion trend can often be analogised to the history of religious figures. The humble and sexy low-rise $3000 Miu Miu micro-miniskirt and Jesus Christ, for example — birthed to minor aversion and fanfare, fanatically gaining the general public’s interest, and then suddenly and cruelly exiled from public favour, with its dogged supporters now derided, dishevelled, and behind the times.

Just as we can examine how society’s obsession with certain individuals indicates ever-changing and ever-dying social and political values, so can our study of a seemingly trivial and meaningless trend. Microtrends, like incels, were formed in part because people wanted to feel the warm embrace of a community where the entry level requirements were bar-none — just buy this one top, or miniskirt, or scarf, and you’re a fashion-forward It Girl fawned over by all. But then, too many undesirables start latching onto this new top and entering this fashion-forward community, and you need to move on to another microtrend. Booooo!

Our need to find a unique identity is exponentiated by our visibility in the global community of social media, and the growing awareness that there are millions of individuals that look and behave just like you. So what can you do (besides cultivating a genuine and rapidly dying sense of community by partaking in activities, hobbies and forums that require actual work, courage, and learning)? Wear something that sets yourself apart from the crowd...

Two trends we are tracking are the coquette and Harajuku styles. However, by the time of publication, some, if not all, may have been banished to clothing deserts already — left to disintegrate into microplastics for forty years and forty nights.

COQUETTE

Coquette has now solidified itself as an embrace of femininity — where ribbons, bows, milkmaid puff sleeves and sheer lace adorn a “reclaimed” female form. The saccharine aesthetics previously condemned in childhood due to societal disdain for the feminine are now embraced with a newfound autonomy, particularly in the form of reclaiming girlhood and innocence of an era bygone.

Unfortunately, as an adult, dressing to emulate the daintiness and sweetness of your childhood self will not preserve you from sexualisation, especially when the ancestors of coquette formed their aesthetics around doing exactly that.

The true roots of this trend can be found in the Victorian Era (1800-1850), where popular silhouettes included extremely puffed or leg-of-mutton sleeves and shoulders, low necked collars with excessive lace trim layers, and full, heavily embellished skirts. Although these details would be discarded in favour of more practical, functional workwear as women started to werk and enter workforces, the modern renaissance of these feminine and dainty styles can be tracked to Tumblr circa 2012-2014 (much like many trends we know and love).

Lana Del Rey’s 2014 album Ultraviolence brought a vulnerable yet seductive sound that inspired a community of online, dismal teenagers to emulate the girls that Del Rey wrote her songs about. More problematically, these girls included a romanticised version of Dolores Haze from Lolita, evidenced in a multitude of ‘Off to the Races’ x Lolita film edits and moodboards.

However, members of these style communities were introduced to topics which were probably not beneficial to the psychological development of impressionable teenage girls, with many of them still likely to have ties to Daddy Dom x Little Girl (DDLG) BDSM communities and pro-eating-disordered (or, pro-ana) groups. It became clear that the nymphette and ‘Babygirl’ style communities coveted a frail, innocent, virginal body, often under the dominance of a man — falling back in line with the traditional, reductive views of women from the very era they took their puff sleeves from.

*Image credit: Sophia Coppola, ‘Marie Antoinette’*

Coquette prophets surfaced and an understanding of their works quickly became indicators of a well-read coquette individual. Some entry level requirements are listed below:

REQUIRED READING, WATCHING, AND LISTENING

My Year of Rest and Relaxation (auth. Ottessa Moshfegh)
The Virgin Suicides (dir. Sofia Coppola)
Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky)
Marie Antoinette (dir. Sofia Coppola)
Lana Del Rey discography

SHOPPING LIST

Sandy Liang
Selkie
SHUSHU/TONG
Mirror Palais
Cecilie Bahnsen

BE ON THE LOOK OUT FOR…

Bow motifs
Lace camisoles
Pearl necklaces
Floral print
Silk/satin

Coquette may just be the most enduring trend encountered in the 2020s and its sons — lovingly named balletcore, lovecore and cottagecore amongst others — have graduated into widespread mainstream consumption. Sandy Liang’s celebration of bows and femininity in fashion have just started to reach mainstream acclaim, while the girl-coded and addictive pleasures of consuming, shopping, and dressing up are eagerly reaffirmed by the coquette community. A tiresome cycle of finding the cutest coquette thing has commenced, bleeding into yucky mainstream hands and losing its charming exclusivity, moving on to the next cutest coquette thing again.

But all things aside from polyester, have to come to an end. Maybe supporters will soon grow sick of the frills and pink thrust upon them and jump ship into edgier, more androgynous styles just as their child selves did. Or maybe this style will last for as long as we associate frills and pink with femininity, and so the competition of who has the most ribbons and the most lace and thus the most woman-ness, will continue.

HARAJUKU STYLE

Japan, or recently coined White Wakanda, has been a place of fascination for foreigners ever since it was forced to open trade with the rest of the world. From Van Gogh to Katy Perry, artists have appropriated Japanese art styles, clothing and practices for their own projects. Inevitably, the world takes a keen and insatiable interest in the unique styles of dressing organised by fashion-forward youth in Japan, and white people continually terrorise Japan’s secondhand market to upsell Japanese vintage on Grailed.

Changes in Japanese mainstream fashion have been fed by the emergence of Japanese youth subcultures, where communities formed on the basis of shared interests and pastimes, and subsequently developed certain ways of dressing to signal their membership of these communities to others.

As subculture styles bleed into mainstream fashion however, their clothing no longer signifies anything meaningful about its owner, and thus these subcultures seem to fragment and die out until their nostalgic resurrection around 20 years later.

Notable Japanese subcultures include:

Gyaru
- Partying and clubbing, rebelling against Japanese beauty standards of pale skin and dark hair
- Blonde hair, tanned skin
- Makeup that exaggerated eyes and lips
Lolita
- Inspired by Victorian and Roccoco styles of dressing
- Modest full knee-length skirts, petticoats, blouses, stockings and bows
- An escape from adulthood by wearing clothing inspired by their childhoods (similar to aesthetics and motives for coquette but unlikely that these communities regularly interacted)

Finally, our subject… Harajuku style:

A collection of subcultures including aforementioned ones
Clothes often thrifted and handmade
An effort to rebel against societal norms through unique, bright and unconventional clothes.

Shoichi Aochi released the first issue of Tokyo-based FRUiTS magazine in 1997, where he would shoot full-page portraits of cool Harajuku individuals in cool clothes. The outfits were so unexpected and mesmerising that they rebranded the thought-to-be reserved, homogenous Japanese youth into creative, innovative, individuals. The shots filled up 233 issues until the publication’s end in 2017, where Aochi eulogised — “there are no more cool kids to photograph”. Yeowch.

The effort to recreate the perfect Y2K style in 2019-2023 left no 2000s photograph untouched. Instagram archive account owners fought tooth and nail to be the first to upload scans of 2000s teen mags and Paris Hilton paparazzi shots — FRUiTs magazine was no different. The Instagram account FRUiTS Magazine Archive was founded in 2019, and attracted a flurry of teens that used the unique, bizarre, indescribable style of Harajuku youth as their fitspo and moodboards, so that they could imitate uniqueness all by themselves. Brands like the notable Marc Jacobs Heaven: “a polysexual line aimed at a younger audience while blurring gender boundaries”, that sells colourful, kitschy clothes for up to $600 AUD, Jaded London, DollsKill and Happy99 seemed to capitalise on this trend, and even replicated pieces from the subjects shown. It seemed like audiences were chasing the unconventionality of the people in FRUiTS magazine, but were not ready to discover these unconventionalities themselves. The cool kids were indeed dead — no one was brave enough to become them ever again.

Marc Jacobs Heaven has faced criticism for replicating and capitalising on the creativity of Japanese youth that scoured and developed their own sense of style on often limited budgets. A white man’s exploitation of the innovative styles of often poor and working-class youth is tiresome and expected. Heaven’s success also reveals how solidified, restricted and slaughtered Harajuku style is now — an American brand has effortlessly commodified and boxed up a subculture’s fashion style, and has cemented itself as a figurehead of Japanese and even Asian fashion. The revival of FRUiTs magazine has also played a part in devouring the culture it thrived on — it created a lookbook for Heaven and participated in an NFT collaboration. It seems that Aochi will happily reinvent ‘cool kids’ as long as they have enough money for him.

Our perception of Harajuku style will be so mutilated by brands such as Heaven that they will become meaningless, shallow American styles — paralleling the Western bastardisations of sushi, kimonos and Pokemon. But rebellious and nonconformist POC youth are more resilient than most — their styles will evolve and develop into places of extreme innovation, meaningfulness and ridiculousness. These are hopefully places where Marc Jacobs cannot follow.

REQUIRED READING, WATCHING, AND LISTENING:

FRUiTs Magazine
NANA (auth. Ai Yazawa)
City Pop

SHOPPING LIST:

Vivienne Westwood
Hysteric Glamour
Colourful kids clothes (Angel Blue, Daisy Lovers)
Bape
Sanrio branded items
Yoshitomo Nara
Marc Jacobs Heaven :/

BE ON THE LOOK OUT FOR…

Vintage Japanese clothing
Oversized, unfitting silhouettes (emulates the homegrown, thrifted look)
Earmuffs
Legwarmers
Skulls
Star patterns