Harajuku, and Then There’s Everywhere Else

Compare street fashion in Tokyo to what you see almost anywhere else and the conclusion arrives quickly: everywhere else is remarkably boring. Where Yvan Rodic’s Facehunter lens pulls in the same self-conscious blend of adjusted hipsters and trusting Gucci buyers in Paris, London, and New York, Harajuku keeps offering him something genuinely different each time he shows up.

Yuna and Fumika, two sixteen-year-olds, were last spotted making their way through the neighborhood dressed as Mario and Luigi. A few streets over, Raymy and M.J. were running what they called a fashion police patrol. And if you got past them, Kazuki and Miyu were waiting at the next corner, done up as urban cyber-pirates in enormous decorated trousers and tiger-print sneakers.

There’s something almost melancholy about how completely the rest of the world has given itself over to recycled vintage and rotating trend cycles—fashion as a social fitness test, nothing more. Tokyo doesn’t seem to know about that agreement, or doesn’t care. It treats imagination as raw material, and the results are strange and genuinely alive. I keep returning to Tokyo Fashion for exactly that reason—the reminder that what people wear can still be something other than a signal of belonging.