The Streets of Harajuku Dress Better Than All of Berlin

Shouting "Sumimasen!" at strangers and pointing a camera at them felt completely natural in Tokyo—which tells you something about what the city is like. It dresses for an audience, or maybe purely for itself, and I was never sure which, and I think that’s the whole point.

Walking through Harajuku, Shibuya, and Shimokitazawa, I spent most of my time just watching. The density of genuinely original personal style in those three neighborhoods exceeds anything I’ve seen across Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, or even Berlin on its best day. Berlin fashion flatters itself too much on its own mythology—a lot of black turtlenecks and deliberate ugliness dressed up as anti-fashion. Tokyo doesn’t have that problem. People there dress because it’s pleasurable, because the street is a surface worth considering.

Among the people I photographed: Suzy, impossibly composed, leaning against a vending machine in an outfit so kaleidoscopic it somehow cohered. Kazuki and Akira, two hypebeast kids who’d clearly done the research. Lilly, who stood out partly because of red hair, partly because of the way she moved through a crowd. Kanaho, a jewelry designer whose accessories were more interesting than most gallery shows I’ve been to. And one person who never gave me his name, or maybe gave it and I didn’t catch it—he smiled and gestured at my camera as if to say: that’s enough, isn’t it?

He was right. I don’t need his name to still remember exactly what he looked like, or to still be a little annoyed that I can’t dress half as well.