The Kids Are Alright: The Fated Return of Youth Subculture in Fashion
Twitter user @Addisonslay has a supplication for the people:
“I get we are out of original ideas because the range of human emotions are limited and art derives from emotion BUT at least drop the nostalgia and give us slightly modified copy-cat ideas instead.”
The fashion landscape of today has started to take on mirage-like conditions. Nostalgia, cloying, ever-misty, beckons us to lap from its pool — but in its place, the climate is punitive and harsh. There is no room to grow. Perhaps the only exception to this is the clairvoyant ability of the youth to draw on the subcultures of their stylistic predecessors, many of them identify-diverse. The undercurrent of Asian influence is as prominent as it is overlooked. We need a stronger word than homage. Turning to the past, the emerging generation is owning their whimsy and unaffectedness to proclaim this: Fashion, and our endless reinterpretation of it, should be fun.
Suffused in Westwoodian colour, Ai Yazawa’s Nana is a perfect sieve of early 2000s punkette and early Harajuku subcultures. The two most prominently featured in the cult classic are the Gyaru and Mori girl aesthetics — the first is recognizable by its excess features of girlhood; tanning, bleached hair and over-accessorization. Mori-girl sprouted from a simple phrase: ‘you look like you came from the forest.’ The softer silhouettes and form-elusive fits are often in muted shades of olive, tan and lighter pastels, and paired with naturalistic accessories, be it a picnic hamper or flowers wreathed into plaits of hair. Both sub-cultures invited one to upbraid the conventional in the Japanese sociocultural, posited to resist the metric rigidity of feminine beauty standards.
The subcultures feature in Nana as ciphers for the two female protagonists, Nana Komatsu and Nana Osaki. Yazawa appoints fashion as the vessel within which the two women begin to forge their own paths in a mercurial world. Plaid, tartan and corsetry are some of the key Westwood touchpoints that were introduced in the Nana universe, peeled directly in homage to the Vivienne Westwood FW 1990-91 “Portrait” collection, as well as the universally revered “Anglomania”, which married the Briton-inspired kilts and skirts with a French nod to exaggerated tailoring.
It’s remarkable how these formulas have been reintroduced on interfaces like Tiktok and Pinterest. Today’s fashion-fond would know (or lovingly eye-roll) at the resurgence of the Westwood orb necklace lying snug on every Depop-literate clavicle. Recycled under labels with a -core suffix, the new generation is foisted with a new challenge altogether: Though nothing in consumption is new under the sun, with the explosion of the internet’s goldfish memory, the roots of key cultural factions are often lost to us. A timeless devotion to the punkette regalia and the loric Japanese street style of the 90s, Nana’s significance cannot be overstated.
In rebuttal of today’s asphyxiating standards in fashion, Beate Karlsson‘s AVAVAV generated quite a stir with their “Fake it Til you Break it” Spring 2023 show. Its absurdist call-out glibly deconstructs the iron-girded projections of wealth and prestige associated with designer houses. A model struts down the runway to have the seams of her bag strap snap in half. This is followed by a stumped heel, skirts and trouser legs that tear to reveal their spindly structural integrity, and the piece de resistance: The backdrop — and fourth wall — collapse, exposing the models and crew backstage to a pearl-clutching audience.
Karlsson says to Hypebeast, ‘The last collection was all about keeping up a fake projection of wealth and the personal failure of losing face when this illusion crashes… I asked myself; what is the most embarrassing thing that can happen to a fashion house and I figured garments breaking might be it.”
This sort of artistic calculation and performance of the absurd shines a light on the pitfalls of fast fashion and consumerism with a comical eye. It harkens to Bahktin’s Carnivalesque; the presupposition of folk and counter-culture taking the place of an inherent system. Here, the monopolising context is obvious: AVAVAV takes its gripe with the conditions set by their cultural masters, the bona fide houses that have long determined what constitutes a successful designer brand. The concept Karlsson highlights of particular interest to me is the losing face; (冇面) [móuh mín] in Cantonese. Its cultural significance cannot be overstated — notions of honour and humility underpin even the minutiae of social interactions, and the zealousness to which reputation is elevated is comparable in the fashion world: To rupture your image and empire would be to embarrass yourself.
In the age of exhaustive cancellation, the only way to weather such controversies is by keeping one’s head down and waiting for the next media cycle to blitz whomever is next in line with a culpable digital footprint.
Karlsson, a 1995-er, plays into this phenomena with an oiled understanding exclusively afforded to the Gen Z vanguard. Frenzy and hysteria will always sell, and the best vehicle for documentation is the one that is quickest to make waves online. A sleight of hand of the best kind, “Fake it Til you Break It” profanes the ideals of highbrow execution whilst cleverly drawing attention to the brand’s shrewd attention to detail. It takes a lot to execute a fuck-up flawlessly, and AVAVAV made sure to do so while the whole world was watching.
Welcome to Heaven, a gateway into the sprawling and enigmatic omniverse of Marc Jacobs subversion. The opening tagline of the brand spin-off is as enticing as it is obscure — what does the subversion entail? Is it the archetypal Marc Jacobs of its ‘94 heyday that we are thwarting, or its renewal of the Fruits Mag aesthetic?
Launched in 2020, Heaven is most recognisable by its mascot: a double-headed bear that engenders the brand’s own ethos towards affordable, ‘polysexual clothing’. The sub-label has generated its own quiff of notoriety with spunky campaigns that invoke the nostalgia of Shoichi Aoki’s legendary street style “Fruits Mag” from Harajuku, Tokyo. With Asa Nirui at the helm, a slew of stars old and new have been appointed as ambassadors — Kyle Mchlachlan, Ice Spice, Rosalia and Kiko Mizuhara, to name a few. Y2K Baby tees, micro minis and strappy shoes with platforms the size of baguettes make up a sizable portion of their offerings.
Heaven, well on its way to becoming what Supreme was to the millennial cache, has ballooned into relevance with Marc Jacobs’ illustrious return to profitability in 2020 for the first time in five years. Coincidence? A seven-minute one, maybe. If the goal was to capture the gimmicky attention of this generation, whose forms and function are inextricable from the drug of nostalgia; I’d say they’ve succeeded.
A particularly well-performing campaign repurposed old beauty ads ripped from the astrological spread in an edition of Seventeen Mag in 1995. Each Heaven-clad Avatar is assembled in varying looks meant to personify its sign, and the astrological craze that never fully powered down from the early 2000s continues to be glamorously parodied for the masses to eat
Ploughing through that world, however, has also netted its fair share of criticism. Its reliance on its star-studded cast elapses an organic ingenuity needed for brand evolution, and this is palpable when you consider the range of dress has not shifted much since the brand’s inception.
The deriding of Heaven online only provokes the question: Is the brand engaging with its origins in a conscientious way? Or does it rely on the neverending nostalgia well to promote its reach?
In 2017, Aoki produced the final publication of Fruits Mag; and his reason for discontinuation was simple: “There were no more fashionable kids to photograph.” Yet, the reach and cult status of the anthology only continued to expand with time. Maybe there is a kernel of truth here: It does feel like we could be at the abyss-end of haute entrepreneurialism. There are of course exceptions to this — Aoki cites Demna Gvasalia and Virgil Abloh as key game changers attempting to turn the tide. I’d humbly propose Peter Do, Quách Đắc Thắng (of La Lune Studios), and Shu Shu Tong as a few others whose body of work cement them as visionaries of a new (and old) world order.
It will be difficult for Heaven to continue maintaining its status as a cultural lexicon for Gen Z without its dual linkages to the Harajuku styles of the past and the cherry-picked names of the latest in. I for one am keen to see if they will usher in an era that isn’t typified by the subcultural influence of the East.
Under the sprawling banner of Asian subculture, the future of fashion has expounded the way we commit our styles to memory. Then it must be true that our consumption continues to be elastic: nostalgia may be overdone, overwrought, but as we’ve learned — it's never that serious. This generation may pillage from the past; but credit should be given to those who rework old into new.