16:26 SHOICHI AOKI INTERIVEW (будем благодарны за перевод) | |
| Shoichi Aoki Interivew Interview by Tony Barrell Translation by Masako Fukui  Tony Barrell: Well the best thing we can start with is if you introduce yourself. Shoichi Aoki: I am Shoichi Aoki, 46 years old. About five years ago I started this magazine FRUiTS. About 15 years ago I had a magazine called STREET which I have just restarted after a two year break. Essentially I do all the photography, editing and I’m the publisher. Tony Barrell: The quality of your magazine is based really on being authentic – you go out, you photograph people. You are not photographing fashion models, you are only street fashion. Could explain your philosophy and why you do that. Shoichi Aoki: Just going back to STREET magazine which I started about fifteen years ago, that was mostly street fashion from overseas, not Japanese but I think that real fashion is what people wear on the streets, the clothes that they wear, the way that they wear them and what you see in fashion magazines, on models, has been styled and it is more commercial and that’s the reason why I began STREET. Japanese street fashion has been traditionally stuff that that people got from Europe and America, just following the European and American trends but about a year before I actually started FRUiTS, suddenly there was this change. People started wearing clothes that weren’t influenced by the West and that prompted me to start FRUiTS. Tony Barrell: What were the things that they were wearing that you noticed? Shoichi Aoki: One of the things was people remaking or recycling Japanese kimono and wearing things like geta – the Japanese wooden clogs - and stuff like that, mixing it with Western fashion which caught my eye and also mixing clothes by young Japanese designers clothes with punk fashion that sort of thing. That probably started either six or five and a half years ago. Tony Barrell: I’d like to ask how you do your job. You take photographs of people, they are usually facing the camera, they are not discreet shots, they are right there, people know you are taking photos of them. How do you operate, do you sort of lurk in shop windows and jump out when you see somebody you like the look of? How does it work? Shoichi Aoki: I just walk up to them and tell them who I am, ask if I can take a photo and then just get them to fill out a short questionnaire. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but each photo has a short description with it - what they like, perhaps it’s music or whatever, what they are doing, how old they are etc Tony Barrell: And what are your criteria for deciding who gets in? Shoichi Aoki: Just sort of a spur of the moment thing. If I see someone that I think is pretty fashionable or pretty cool, so it has a lot to do with my own taste but usually I don’t include people who have just one brand who are really into brands. Tony Barrell: Unless they are using it as some ironic comment? Shoichi Aoki: People don’t really choose their fashion with a deeper meaningful message and that’s what I’m looking for as well, not some sort of a deeper message, just something that looks good – just want they like. Just look for what looks good – no deeper message. Tony Barrell: It used to be that Japanese people were very brand conscious, in awe of brands and brand names. Is that still the case? Shoichi Aoki: Yes, basically Japan is still into brands, but the kids in FRUiTS are different, they are not obsessed by brands, perhaps when they are grown up they might be but they are not a present. In Shibuya and Ginza and places like that there seems to be still a brand obsession, but the kids in FRUiTS don’t fit the bill. Tony Barrell: What do you think that means about young Japanese people. What do you think that says about them? Shoichi Aoki: I felt like there was a new generation that was becoming visible and perhaps most poignant thing about this new generation was the use of the kimono. The kimono is something that Japanese people feel quite close to and yet it is traditional so also it’s ‘far away’. If commercial fashion designers had started to reuse the kimono it would probably not have worked but these young people took it back into their own culture and I felt like that was a streak of genius coming - and real self expression. I felt it wasn’t something that was influenced by things in magazines or in the movies. Tony Barrell: It was a genuine grass roots movement. It is interesting the way street fashion does come from nowhere. You see it happen and then after about three years the high fashion houses copy it and sell it back to the middle classes, but now it seems that nobody can copy it because they don’t know where it’s coming from or where it’s going. Shoichi Aoki: It’s good that there are so many different genres, it means that there is variety and it’s great how consumers are actually feeding what they want back to the fashion designers in a sort of reverse process. But that trend was at its peak about three years ago and I think it’s actually going backwards now and the magazines and fashion designers are once again determining what kids are wearing - and they are mostly getting their cues again from overseas, from Europe and America the United States. Tony Barrell: So that thing that happened five years ago you think was like a burst of energy, that’s not quite the same now? Shoichi Aoki: There is a reason why it’s going backwards. Most of that trend as documented in FRUiTS grew from Harajuku and for a long time the streets of Harajuku were closed off to cars on weekends and it was like a young people’s haven - they’d all get together to hang out there. The fashion that you see in FRUiTS was a movement that grew out of those young people networking with each other, being together and being inspired by each other. About three years ago the streets were opened up again to vehicle traffic so there is no longer really anywhere for young people to get together, so that movement has kind of stopped and is going back to the commercial base with the designers feeding style to young people. Tony Barrell: We wandered around Harajuku the other day and wondered why it didn’t look as interesting and maybe that’s the reason. One thing I meant to ask you was that each generation has its own kind of attempt to establish a street style, but I get the impression that, maybe it’s because I’m getting old - but I’ve been getting old a long time so maybe that isn’t the reason - that the people who are innovating street style seem much younger now. Is this true? That there are much younger girls and boys doing these things now than there were say ten or twenty years ago? Shoichi Aoki: When I started FRUiTS most of the people who were the sort of instigators were about nineteen so they’d just left high school but now it seems to be more like kids in their third year of junior high or first year of senior high so a lot younger and the nineteen year old kids are wearing more conservative clothes, something that’s a little bit less out there. Tony Barrell: There was a fashion two years ago which I saw when I came to Tokyo called the ‘ganguro’ girls. Where did they come from and what happened to them? I’m very curious, you must have done features on them and I’m sure I’ve seen the photographs. They intrigued me because they seemed to be very original and quite unique. Shoichi Aoki: Ganguro was a phenomenon that was specific to Shibuya, about 1km away from Harajuku - which we have been talking about - and they were totally different so FRUiTS as a rule didn’t really take them up. Only a few times we’ve covered ganguro in our magazine. Where they came from is actually a mystery, no one really knows but there is some speculation that they were girls who were infatuated or fascinated with Janet Jackson or black American musicians or perhaps Naomi Campbell, the super model, but it’s still a mystery what their origins were. Tony Barrell: They disappeared but I still see lots of very young girls with tan make-up on their faces and legs and arms so that still seems to be quite popular - ‘Charlie’s Angels from hell’ I call them - you know the blonde hair and the boots, the mini skirts, they all look like they were ready for war from the 1970s. But they weren’t very chic they were kind of in your face. I felt that they were quite a challenge the ‘gang girls’. Shoichi Aoki: The fashion kind of grew out of them trying to identity themselves as a group I guess, to try and separate themselves from the rest of the population and their culture and their way of life was quite unique for example they were quite liberated sexually liberated. Their views on morality were quite different and separate from the rest of the community. It was their attempt to separate themselves basically, to show that they were quite different but now they have kind of disappeared, things have changed and no one really knows where they’ve gone. Tony Barrell: One strange fashion that I’d like to get a comment on is, I’d call it ‘Little Women’ also seen it referred to as ‘Gothic Lolita’ and that is young girls, well pretty young, fifteen or sixteen, wearing maids outfits, with ringlet hair and little hats and lots of white lace and stockings, they look like Victorian nineteenth century waitresses or maids. What do you call this fashion? Shoichi Aoki: This Gothic Lolita only sprang up about a year ago so it’s quite new. There was this Lolita fashion which has been around for a while. Gothic Lolita started off as a very small trend but is spreading, it is sort of a trickle effect and there are other people wearing those clothes. Personally I don’t like it very much, it’s a little bit daggy. Tony Barrell: So your taste does matter then? Shoichi Aoki: My taste is: it has to be original, something that’s high in originality, not too obsessed with brands and something that’s mixed, you know, lots of things mixed together and layered. Tony Barrell: You said that the Harajuku scene has changed because the community has been prevented from getting together in the way it used to. What is your view in general of the street culture scene in Japan? You said before you think it is going backwards, can you elaborate on the state you think youth culture in Japan is in? Shoichi Aoki: It seems to be a situation where there is nothing new springing up that could just be a temporary thing or it could be permanent, I’m not really sure. In a Japan, a new trend that is not so confronting, that’s not so aggressive is OK. People can accept that but something quite confronting, like what we are talking about in FRUiTS is bound to be squashed by the community and especially now when the economy is facing a downturn, most of the adult community are being a little bit more conservative, so there is a tendency to push down or destroy things that are confronting that come from youth culture. So it’s not really an environment conducive to giving birth to something new or fresh and personally I think that the future is a little bit bleak. Tony Barrell: One of the things that I think probably, the appeal of FRUiTS magazine really is that the people who you feature in your magazine, they get recognition from the magazine, it’s like a kind of dialogue you set up, they see themselves in the magazine and then they feel that their style and their posture is legitimated by the magazine and so on and it creates a kind of community. Can that continue or is that just a fad? Shoichi Aoki: Continuing the process you were talking about, about the dialogue between the magazine and the young people is probably difficult to continue – you can’t take photographs of people that don’t exist and in order to take pictures of them they have to be doing the things, wearing the clothes basically - they have got to be there. In the UK if you’ve got some young kids who are acting up but if people don’t particularly like what they are doing they are usually left alone if they don’t harm anybody else, but in Japan if there is a youth trend that people don’t like there is a tendency to push them down, to try to get rid of it, and this is exactly what happened to Harajuku where the kids used to just hang out; some of the adults thought they were too noisy, not just noisy in the ‘noise’ sense but in the cultural sense too, so a few of them got together and decided to get rid of that area and get rid of the networking that went on there. There is a trend at the moment where young people are feeling this pressure and feeling suppressed so it might be difficult to continue this dialogue. Tony Barrell: So in a sense you are a little bit pessimistic about the way things are and to a large extent that’s because of the way the country is and the way the power groups in the country are behaving at the moment? Shoichi Aoki: When these kids feel resistance they tend to run away, not like the English young kids who created punk, that was their form of resistance, Japanese kids don’t really do that. Источник: www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/ni>ghtairstories/s788802... профиль дневник | |
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