Lazy Oaf Lets Tokyo Eat It Alive

Harajuku has a way of making everything else look timid. Walk through it and every fashion instinct you thought you had starts to feel embarrassingly conservative—all that restraint, all that coordination suddenly seems like a failure of nerve. London label Lazy Oaf has always understood this. Their whole aesthetic is built on controlled visual overload: prints that fight each other for attention, colors that have no business sharing an outfit, a deliberate refusal to look polished. Which makes Harajuku the natural venue for a shoot.

For their summer 2014 collection they brought model Ella Merryweather and filmmaker James Rees to Tokyo and sent them into the Spiral Toy Store—a place that seems specifically engineered to induce a cheerful, fluorescent delirium. The resulting footage is exactly what it should be: a woman in Lazy Oaf’s summer pieces moving through aisles of color and plastic, everything competing for the frame at once, nothing clearly winning. The clothes don’t calm any of it down. They make it worse. That’s a compliment.

There’s a category of fashion that only makes sense in motion, in specific conditions, at a particular level of visual noise. Strip it out and put it on a white background and something dies in it. Lazy Oaf knows this. Harajuku knew it first.