Ory Bartal
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781526139979
- eISBN:
- 9781526152039
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526139986.00009
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This chapter discusses avant-garde Japanese fashion and the countercultural use of the body as a critical site of resistance in Japan. Focusing on the young Japanese designers who turned against a ...
More
This chapter discusses avant-garde Japanese fashion and the countercultural use of the body as a critical site of resistance in Japan. Focusing on the young Japanese designers who turned against a homogeneous, collectivist culture to create various subcultures by using style as a social statement in the 1970s, this chapter presents the popular kawaii culture as a colourful and fluffy protest against the humdrum, everyday life of the corporate employees (sararīman) working for Japanese conglomerates, who represented the values and norms of Japanese society in the 1970s. Alongside this protest, this chapter also presents the deconstructive fashion of the Comme des Garçons company and its designer, Rei Kawakubo. As of the 1970s, Kawakubo engaged with the politics of the body and identity and countered the aesthetic discourse and repressive values imposed by the fashion world through dress patterns and fashion photographs that presented women with an imaginary ‘ideal’ body. These two oppositional fashion statements challenged different power hierarchies (in Japanese society and in the fashion world), while addressing issues of class and gender.Less
This chapter discusses avant-garde Japanese fashion and the countercultural use of the body as a critical site of resistance in Japan. Focusing on the young Japanese designers who turned against a homogeneous, collectivist culture to create various subcultures by using style as a social statement in the 1970s, this chapter presents the popular kawaii culture as a colourful and fluffy protest against the humdrum, everyday life of the corporate employees (sararīman) working for Japanese conglomerates, who represented the values and norms of Japanese society in the 1970s. Alongside this protest, this chapter also presents the deconstructive fashion of the Comme des Garçons company and its designer, Rei Kawakubo. As of the 1970s, Kawakubo engaged with the politics of the body and identity and countered the aesthetic discourse and repressive values imposed by the fashion world through dress patterns and fashion photographs that presented women with an imaginary ‘ideal’ body. These two oppositional fashion statements challenged different power hierarchies (in Japanese society and in the fashion world), while addressing issues of class and gender.
Ory Bartal
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781526139979
- eISBN:
- 9781526152039
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526139986
- Subject:
- Art, Art History
This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan, which emerged during the tumultuous 1960s and continues to inspire contemporary designers today. The postwar avant-garde milieu gave ...
More
This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan, which emerged during the tumultuous 1960s and continues to inspire contemporary designers today. The postwar avant-garde milieu gave rise to a ground-breaking popular visual language and garnered tremendous attention across the fields of product design, graphic design, fashion design, and architecture. It created conceptually challenging artefacts and made decisions that radically altered the course of Japanese design history. The avant-garde works that were created in the sphere of popular culture communicated a form of visual and material protest inspired by the ideologies and critical theories of the 1960s and 1970s, which were concerned with feminism, body politics, the politics of identity, and, later, ecological, anti-consumerist, and anti-institutional critiques as well as an emphasis on otherness. These designers were driven by passion, anger, and a desire to critique and change society and introduce the avant-garde political thinking of the 1960s and subversive visual and material practices into the heart of consumer culture starting from the 1980s. Their creations thus combined two seemingly contradictory concepts: luxury and the avant-garde. By presenting the new arena of avant-garde Japanese design that is operating as a critical sociopolitical agent and involves an encounter between popular culture, postmodern aesthetics, critical theory, and new economic rules, the book carries the common discourse on Japanese design beyond aesthetic concerns and especially beyond ‘beautiful’ or ‘sublime’, revealing the radical aesthetic of the designed objects that forms an interface leading to critical social protest.Less
This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan, which emerged during the tumultuous 1960s and continues to inspire contemporary designers today. The postwar avant-garde milieu gave rise to a ground-breaking popular visual language and garnered tremendous attention across the fields of product design, graphic design, fashion design, and architecture. It created conceptually challenging artefacts and made decisions that radically altered the course of Japanese design history. The avant-garde works that were created in the sphere of popular culture communicated a form of visual and material protest inspired by the ideologies and critical theories of the 1960s and 1970s, which were concerned with feminism, body politics, the politics of identity, and, later, ecological, anti-consumerist, and anti-institutional critiques as well as an emphasis on otherness. These designers were driven by passion, anger, and a desire to critique and change society and introduce the avant-garde political thinking of the 1960s and subversive visual and material practices into the heart of consumer culture starting from the 1980s. Their creations thus combined two seemingly contradictory concepts: luxury and the avant-garde. By presenting the new arena of avant-garde Japanese design that is operating as a critical sociopolitical agent and involves an encounter between popular culture, postmodern aesthetics, critical theory, and new economic rules, the book carries the common discourse on Japanese design beyond aesthetic concerns and especially beyond ‘beautiful’ or ‘sublime’, revealing the radical aesthetic of the designed objects that forms an interface leading to critical social protest.
