Nowhere Else to Go

I saw pictures of girls in Harajuku with their whole bodies painted in these bright blocks—yellow, turquoise, pink, colors that don’t match anything because they’re not supposed to. The trend is called Ishoku Hada, which is just Japanese for unique skin, and it’s centered around this girl Sonoramas and her friends Miyako and Lilly and Cherry and Lmskii and Miku, all of them covered in color, walking through Harajuku and Shibuya like they’re trying to prove something about what happens when you refuse to stop pushing.

Harajuku’s been the test kitchen for Tokyo fashion trends forever. Everything gets invented there first—styles from everywhere mixing with styles from nowhere until something emerges that nobody’s seen before. Anime influencing street fashion influencing high fashion, cultures colliding and recombining. It’s the place where you go to see what everyone else will be wearing in six months.

But here’s the thing about a place like that: you eventually run out of things to do to the surface of your body. You can dye your hair every color that exists. You can mix fashions from every era and every continent. You can stack on accessories until you can barely move. You can wear makeup in ways that make you look like a different species. And then one day you realize you’ve exhausted the wardrobe. The only frontier left is the skin itself. So that’s where you go.

I get the logic of it, even if I don’t know if I’d do it myself. There’s something about refusing to accept the plateau of fashion, the idea that there’s some point where you’re done and you just maintain what you’ve got. In Harajuku, standing still is death. You escalate. You find the next untouched thing. If that’s your skin, then that’s your skin.