The Kids Who Stopped Asking Permission

Growing up, I was quietly jealous of girls. Not in any complicated way—just the pragmatic envy of someone with fewer options. They could layer skirts over trousers, mix menswear and ballgowns, wear something different every day and call it personal style. Boys showed up in jeans and a t-shirt, or they got stared at. In the small town where I grew up, difference was treated as a personal failing, and the wardrobe was a closed system with no appeals process.

Harajuku—the Tokyo neighborhood that has functioned as the fashion epicenter of East Asia for decades, possibly the whole world—runs on different logic, or rather on the understanding that the old logic was always optional. Even there, the social pressure toward conformity is real, stronger in Japan than almost anywhere. But a growing number of young people in Harajuku are simply ignoring the concept of gendered clothing entirely: boys wearing what was designed for girls, girls wearing what was designed for boys, the whole division dissolving into whatever looks right and feels good.

i-D spent time with Satsuki Nakayama, Yutaro Goto, and Ayumu Shimokuni in Tokyo—three people who just wear what they want and have stopped waiting for permission to do so. Their argument isn’t ideological, it’s almost bored: fashion has nothing to do with gender, and clothing shouldn’t carry that weight. They just get dressed. More and more people around them are starting to do the same, and the only ones bothered by it are the ones who were always going to be bothered.