Tokyo Fashion

Back on the West Coast

Since I’ve returned, life seems to move at the pace of molasses here on the West Coast; quite a welcome pace after a year’s stint living at the speed of light in Tokyo. I leapt over the Pacific to catch up on the Tokyo fashion scene, pursue freelance curating and writing, and discover some of my roots all while working as an English Teacher. I dropped everything (my friends, family, loyal boyfriend, and yawn-inducing desk job) to dwell in the very heart of the city’s fast-paced fashion and youth culture, Shibuya. What I loved so deeply about Tokyo fashion was the freedom to wear whatever you wanted however you wanted to any degree of fashion schizophrenia. Did I take advantage of it? Of course. My name is Chako Suzuki, I’m 27 years old, and I have a knock-down dirty love affair with fashion.

La Foret

This feverish love affair led me through two survival-of-the-fittest bi-annual sales in Tokyo at the famous La Foret department store in Harajuku. The city has only two sales during the entire year. This was a shocking new concept for me coming from America where there are ten million sales going on simultaneously all over the country and discount stores are a dime-a-dozen. In Japan, there is so much frenzy over new clothes and accessories that most items never even see a sale, despite the ridiculous price tags. Fashion companies are able to turn out copies from the runway in a matter of weeks to indulge fashion frenzies and refill empty sales racks; it takes the US several months. By the time a trend hits America, it has already long been binged and purged by obsessed Japanese fashion bulimics (a current example is the re-gurgitation of leggings into mainstream fashion).

Crazed Shoppers

Before the four-day long chaotic bargain hunt, small hordes of crazed shoppers camp out overnight in front of department stores in either July’s sweltering 90-degree, 80%-humidity heat or January’s frigid 30-degree winters to bust the down doors at the 7 a.m. grand opening. I decided to check out See By Chloe’s sale and found out that they were having a “time sale” in fifteen minutes. Time sales are secret 1-hour slots allotted to partial or full markdown on the entire store (signs are posted for them within an hour before they start) and they also mean that even more pushing, shoving, elbow-throwing, and swiping will commence once the curtain drops. Sales in Tokyo are always a no-holds-barred sport — we shoppers are all gladiators and only the strongest get the good stuff.

The Net

With my sister and a friend, we spotted a group of girls lining up and got in line. There was a net blocking the entrance to the store and shop girls were running around frantically changing the 60% off signs to 80% off. The buzz and the crowd grew and, as all hardcore shoppers would, we started to make a game plan to maximize our savings. When the net dropped, we’d rush in and grab whatever we could. More and more girls were lining up, the pressure was mounting, but the three of us had ironclad shoppers’ will.

The net dropped and the stereo blasted. They were playing The Offspring, which spurned a shoppers’ anarchy. I felt like we were back in high school at some Backstreet Boys concert in a mess of overeager teenage fans. It was an anxiety-ridden five minutes, but we were able to converge somehow among the tiny sea of grabbing hands and jutting elbows to be spit out, breathless and empty-handed. This was probably the most exciting guerilla shopping expedition I’d ever braved.

I love It , Baby

Tokyo-ites do a bang-up job of stirring up the shopping hysteria. The music is blasted in every little boutique and shop girls are on soapboxes yelling at shoppers to come in and save. Expensive clothes are thrown in cardboard boxes and shoppers are clattering around in their heels trying to grab whatever they can and pay for it. The sale becomes less about what you can get on sale than about what you can get at all. Would this sales model work in the United States or are we far too pessimistic to brave sales where agility and endurance are key factors? I think I couldn’t be bothered to go to sales like that if they happened here (I usually won’t even go to sample sales because of the competition), but overseas, I love getting swept up in sale-season pandemonium. In Tokyo, that’s how it was, how it is, and how it will always be. Love it or leave it, baby, and I love it.

- Chako Suzuki
Photos by Tamiko Suzuki