Japanese Fashion Cultures Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan [Hardcover]

From Rococo to Edwardian fashions, Japanese street style has reinvented many western dress styles, reinterpreting and altering their meanings and messages in a different cultural and historical context. This wide ranging and original study reveals the complex exchange of styles and what they represent in Japan and beyond, contesting common perceptions of gender in Japanese dress and the notion that non-western fashions simply imitate western styles.

Through case studies focussing on fashion image consumption in style tribes such as Kamikaze Girls, Lolita, Edwardian, Ivy Style, Victorian, Romantic and Kawaii, this ground-breaking book investigates the complexities of dress and gender and demonstrates the flexible nature of contemporary fashion and style exchange in a global context.Japanese Fashion Cultureswill appeal to students and scholars of fashion, cultural studies, gender studies, media studies and related fields.

1. Introducing Japanese Fashion, Past and Present
2. Lost in a Gaze: Young Men and Fashion in Contemporary Japan
3. Boy's Elegance: A Liminality of Boyish Charm and Old-World Suavity
4. Glac?? Wonderland: Cuteness, Sexuality and Young Women
5. Ribbons and Lace: Girls, Decorative Femininity and Androgyny
6. An Ivy Boy and a Preppy Girl: Style Import-Export
7. Concluding Japanese Fashion Cultures, Change and Continuity
Bibliography
Index

Masafumi Mondenis Research Associate at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

???Fashion trends are inherently transitory and intrinsically fragmented. Yet Monden sees sufficient continuities and commonalities within the world of contemporary Japanese fashion to warrant a search for significant social and cultural insights. In his four case studies, he examines fashion magazines aimed specifically at young men, the reasons behind the style choices of two female 'idol' singers, the seeming discontinuities between outward appearance and hardhelCÜ