Viscose Journal Issue 9 Japan

“Japan” is a perfect object for fashion study insofar as fashion, as a consumer-capitalist and transnational system of style, is itself partially Japanese. With the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan concluded its feudal period and rapidly industrialised its consumer systems in parallel with those of the West, with which it interacted both structurally and formally from the get-go. Through Japanese historical concepts such as moga girls (モダンガール), the great drama of capitalist fashion modernity as it interacts with the body—and with the built environment—plays out in full galore, and does so with a crucial emphasis on commodity import/export. Indeed, which style objects enter—and leave—Japan, a proud island nation with a long imperial history, forms the central dialectic of Japanese culture as it negotiates the forces and possibilities of a globalising world.

This dynamic has continued far into Japan’s post-imperial era (1947–) and continues to play out today as a global system of images and objects, workers and consumers. Even as its economic power has waned, Japan remains a cultural superpower. This has slowly rendered it a reified archival object: a dust-covered but intensely alluring diamond from a near-forgotten era. The renewed hype around Japanese vintage clothing, the surge of tourism—millions of visitors seeking out the nation as a kind of Disneyland lost in translation, a heritage frozen in time—make this clear.

With a particular focus on the 1990s as our starting point, our inquiry moves outward—through professional networks, friendships, and archives—to much earlier periods, as well as to the present. In making this issue, our instinct was to uncover the lesser-known, deeply social histories of Japanese fashion production. In doing so, we ultimately hope to challenge our readers’ assumptions about what qualifies (as) “Japan”—as an idea, a place, a network, and an image—at all.