Japanese Fashion Cultures: Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan

JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES Dress and gender in contemporary Japan Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. MASAFUMI MONDEN Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from usyd on 2017-07-23 19:57:05. v Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Masafumi Monden, 2015 Masafumi Monden has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the Author. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-3621-1 PB: 978-1-4725-3280-0 ePDF: 978-1-4725-8673-5 ePub: 978-1-4725-8672-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Monden, Masafumi. Japanese fashion cultures : dress and gender in contemporary Japan / Masafumi Monden. pages cm – (Dress, body, culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4725-3280-0 (paperback) — ISBN 978-1-4725-3621-1 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-4725-8673-5 (epdf) 1. Fashion–Japan–History. 2. Clothing and dress– Japan–History. 3. Clothing and dress–Social aspects–Japan. I. Title. GT1560.M63 2015 391.00952—dc23 2014010741 Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk vi Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-07-23 19:44:29. CONTENTS List of illustrations viii Acknowledgements x 1 Introducing Japanese fashion, past and present 1 2 Lost in a gaze: young men and fashion in contemporary Japan 17 3 Boy’s elegance: a liminality of boyish charm and old-world suavity 45 Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. 4 Glacé wonderland: cuteness, sexuality and young women 77 5 Ribbons and lace: girls, decorative femininity and androgyny 107 6 An Ivy boy and a preppy girl: style import-export 135 7 Concluding Japanese fashion cultures, change and continuity 149 Notes 153 References 183 Index 197 vii Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-07-23 19:44:52. ILLUSTRATIONS Figures 2.1 The cover of Men’s Club no. 31 22 3.1 High school student Musashi Rhodes wearing (a) Milkboy’s scarf tee and (b) a shirt with studs 46 Teenage actor Ryutaro Akimoto looking cute in Milkboy’s bow-tie shirt and a pair of sarouel trousers 63 Musashi Rhodes and Yota Tsurimoto wearing clothes from Milkboy’s 2013–14 collection 66 Musashi Rhodes with a ‘Neo-Edwardian’ schoolboy look, wearing a dolman jacket, check pocket trousers and a top hat 70 4.1 Jun’ichi Nakahara’s illustration of a chic and lovely shoˉ jo 82 4.2 Kashoˉ Takabatake’s beautiful girl with flowers 84 4.3 Alisa Mizuki in ‘Town of Eden’ (1991) 90 4.4 Tomoko Kawase/Tommy February in ‘Bloomin’!’ (2002) 91 4.5 Kaela Kimura in ‘Snowdome’ (2007) 92 5.1 Amateur model Misako Aoki dressed in Innocent World’s Pompadour bustle dress 112 5.2 Momoko and Ichigo’s first encounter 119 5.3 Momoko and Ichigo at ‘Forest of the Aristocrats’ 121 5.4 Clad in a white Lolita dress, Momoko drives a scooter with a serious mien 129 Bankara boys of old higher schools (kyuˉ sei koˉ koˉ ) in school uniform, c. 1930s 139 ‘Miyuki Zoku’ in Tokyo, Japan 140 3.2 3.3 Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. 3.4 6.1 6.2 viii Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-07-23 19:45:07. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ix Tables 1.1 Data from the Survey of The Lifestyles and Consciousness of High School Students 10 2.1 Content analysis of the three men’s magazines 25 2.2 Three postures of male models 33 3.1 BMI of Japanese young men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine 52 Body size of male models in Men’s non-no and Choki Choki 54 Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. 3.2 Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-07-23 19:45:07. 5 RIBBONS AND LACE: GIRLS, DECORATIVE FEMININITY AND ANDROGYNY ‘There’s one thing about you,’ Maudie said. ‘You always look ladylike.’ ‘Oh God,’ I said, ‘who wants to look ladylike?’ —JEAN RHYS, Voyage in the Dark, 1934.1 . . . for the aesthetics of the rococo, the more delicate a girl becomes, the higher her value. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. —Shimotsuma Monogatari. 2 A girl of seventeen drives a scooter fast. In the blurred images, her white, delicately flounced dress flutters on wind. She then collides with a greengrocer’s truck and soars high in the beautiful sky, a bunch of cabbages waltzing and whirling behind her. She falls gracefully in a fashion redolent of Alice falling down into the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This is what we encounter soon after the opening in the Japanese film Shimotsuma Monogatari (Shimotsuma Story or Kamikaze Girls, abbreviated as Shimotsuma 2004). Clair Hughes in her book Dressed in Fiction argues that ‘[t]raditionally, aspects of dress have been used to portray aspects of personality, particularly when a character first enters the story’.3 A girl attired in a white, lace calf-length puff-sleeved dress, known as Japanese Lolita dress, with a pair of Vivienne Westwood’s Rockin’ Horse shoes, rides a scooter fast with a serious mien. If what Hughes argues is applicable to films, this sequence alone is enough to hint that Shimotsuma offers a portrayal of teenage girls that is full of juxtapositions and contradictory images. These are revolutionary and striking. Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. 107 Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. 108 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES In the previous chapter, I argued that some Japanese female performers manifest the possibility of a detachment from the eroticism often associated with ‘infantile’ cute and apparently girlish appearances. In this chapter I pay attention to the established idea that female sartorial ornamentation is a stable signifier of dependency and subservience, the view made famous by architect Adolf Loos and sociologist Thorstein Veblen at the turn of the last century. This idea continues to the present day, most notably via feminist scholars. For them, women’s concerns for appearance, including fashion, operates for the purpose of attracting and serving the objectifying male gaze. These ideas substantiate one facet of gender performative theory, articulated by Judith Butler, which considers gender as a construction created and sustained by series of performances including gestures and dress. The socially inscribed dress of ‘femininity’ creates, demarcates and distinguishes the gender category from ‘masculinity’, which is symbolically embodied by the austere, sober and supposedly more functional men’s suit. To what extent does a ‘girlish’ and emphatically ‘ornamental’ fashion-look as typified by Japanese Lolita style, then, inevitably signify such unfavourable connotations? Is it instead a visual embodiment of Valerie Steele’s view that ‘[h]istoricizing, glamorous fashion could be subversive, not nostalgic’?4 The functionalist idea that construes decorative femininity as symbolic of oppression has been both critiqued and challenged by scholars of dress, particularly since the 1970s. Works by Bonnie G. Smith (1981), Elizabeth Wilson (1985), Valerie Steele (1985) and Joanne Entwistle (2000) are but a few examples. Following these works, what I hope to achieve with this chapter is to offer an alternative to the somewhat monolithic idea that amalgamates decorative girlish fashion and unfavourable feminine passivity. I employ Shimotsuma and its predominantly positive depiction of Lolita fashion as an exemplary case study of this aim. This in turn reinforces another facet of the theory of gender performativity, that a young woman can ‘perform’ both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ acts alternately, while being clad in the same white puff-sleeved dress adorned with flounces and ribbons (in the case of Shimotsuma). Thus, the film demonstrates the idea of performative gender even more effectively and credibly. I begin the above operation with a general overview of Lolita fashion. I explain how this concept is a manifestation of a complex cultural commingling between European and Japanese cultures. The second section consists of a textual analysis of Shimotsuma. In particular, by examining what roles clothes play in the film, this section argues that fashion is much more than a mere embellishment to the narrative, and that the film’s representation of Lolita fashion is therefore eloquent. The subversive qualities of Shimotsuma that problematize traditional negative views about decorative femininity are the focus of the third section. In the final section I aim to explore the socio-psychological analysis of Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. RIBBONS AND LACE 109 ‘androgyny’, which the heroine’s fluent demonstration of both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ attributes arguably endorses. I seek to establish the idea that ‘androgyny’ does not necessarily have to be manifested through ‘masculine’ clothes, and that the ornamental and ‘girlish’ sartorial style could be equally effective in its performance. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. The dress of a bisque doll princess: aspects of Lolita fashion Japanese Lolita fashion, which was believed to emerge in the mid-to-late 1990s, is characterized by its self-consciously girlish style, often with the extravagant opulence of lace, flounces and ribbons. The style’s origins remain largely undecided.5 Nor is there any clear definition of Lolita style; rather, it functions as a general term for a number of subtly different trends.6 The orthodoxy of the fashion style, however, consists of a highly elaborate, Victorian ‘little girl’ calflength dress hooped with layers of pannier, frilly knee-length socks, and ‘Mary Jane’ or strap shoes including Westwood’s Rockin’ Horse ballerina. The look is completed with intricate headdresses or bonnets. This fashion, when practised in its ‘full-on’ form, is often associated with the physical restrictions the style imposes on the wearer. Akinori Isobe, the owner of the renowned Lolita fashion brand Baby, The Stars Shine Bright (hereafter abbreviated as Baby), once admitted that the opulent use of lace and frills makes his garments both heavy and impeding.7 Echoing this impression, the actress Kyoko Fukada, who wears Lolita garments (including some actually designed by Baby) in Shimotsuma, commented that they were not as physically impeding as she had expected.8 For some who wear this style, Lolita is not merely a choice of clothing, but also defines their identity and lifestyle.9 Their fashion and demure body language is closely associated with their romantic views of privileged young women in the idle, aristocratic elite social classes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe (Marie Antoinette of France and Alice in Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books are most obvious and accessible examples). Yet to what extent does Lolita style embrace and appropriate historic European dress styles? The style’s appropriation of European dress forms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries appears to be more conceptual than stylistic, embroidered with certain aesthetic essences of these periods. In this sense, it is a ‘transtexual’ style in which references to other texts or sources are deployed, and definitely not a straightforwardly accurate and monotonous replication of period dress.10 In addition to the aesthetic sensibilities conceptualized and romanticized by Lolita, we shall also see how Japanese understandings of historic European dresses have been influenced by Japanese popular culture (e.g. girls’ manga). Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. 110 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. Embroidering the romantic past: European dress aesthetics and Japanese appropriations Steele writes of Lolita fashion in her book Japan Fashion Now, noting ‘[t]he look as a whole is often said to resemble a nineteenth-century French doll or jumeau’.11 Thus, the Japanese style has some historical references to period clothes.12 This is despite the fact that the notable promulgation of European women’s clothing forms in Japan did not occur until the early twentieth century, during the Taishō period (1912–26), when the ‘modern girl’ and ‘garçonne’ look emerged, and Western buildings and furniture styles also became prevalent in the country’s urban centres.13 Close observation of Lolita style reveals that its incorporation of European fashion aesthetics has not necessarily been concerned by historical or stylistic authenticity. The manner in which historical accuracy gives way to aesthetic preferences in Lolita style is representative of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of fashion. Ulrich Lehmann summarizes it thus: ‘a particular style or stylistic element is taken from costume history and brought into present fashion to create reference and friction simultaneously, along with new commodities’.14 Lolita incorporates the ideas of certain aesthetic elements from historical European dresses, but its actual style is considerably contemporary. Lolita fashion does, however, have a history. As noted in the previous chapter, the intensive saturation of lace and frilly aesthetic sensitivity through Japanese pop culture in the 1970s and 1980s was a likely precursor to Lolita fashion. Japanese clothing brands such as Milk, Pink House (est. 1972) and Megumi Murano’s Jane Marple (est. 1985) were founded during this period. These brands are considered part of the so-called Japanese DC (Designer and Character) brands, which boomed during the bubble years in the 1980s. DC brands, such as Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons as well as Milk, have wider consumer appeal than Lolita style, and despite not identifying with fashion, their somewhat romantic, girlish aesthetics are shared by later Lolita fashion brands, such as Baby (est. 1988). The link between shoˉ jo manga and Lolita aesthetics is quite clearly indicated. Fumiyo Isobe, a designer and co-founder of Baby, for example, acknowledges the influences of Yumiko Oshima’s girls’ comic books such as Banana Bread Pudding (Banana Bread no Pudding, 1977–8) on her designs.15 Such appropriation and restylization displays a degree of creativity and hence authority exercised by Japanese designers. Masuko Honda’s analysis of a girlish aesthetic in Japan, typified by fluttering ribbons, or dresses of decorative lace and frills (hirahira), which are associated with senses of romanticism and latitude, also emphasizes a link between the concept of Japanese ‘girlhood’ and decorative Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. RIBBONS AND LACE 111 sartorial items.16 This in turn supports the view that transcultural appropriation of dress can be systematic and tactical.17 How, then, have Japanese fashion designers sartorially translated and adopted such ideas? Lolita dress often exudes an air of robe à la française style.18 This court dress style was ‘an open robe with box-pleated panels falling from the shoulder to form a train’, hooped with panniers, and was a popular dress for upper-class women throughout the eighteenth century in Europe.19 To emphasize this aspect of hooped petticoats, ‘the skirt was open in front to reveal a decorative petticoat’, and even an ‘ordinary’ robe à la française ‘was highly decorated, made of patterned silks covered in ribbons, ruffles, furbelows, and lace’.20 This is explicated in a Lolita dress, designed by Innocent World (est. 1998) with the name of ‘Pompadour bustle skirt (dress)’.21 Its name alone connotes the rococo reference. Pompadour refers to Jeanne Poisson (1721–64), known as the Marquise de Pompadour, a famous mistress of French King Louis XV; she had ‘come to be the personification of the rococo in costume with its curving serpentine lines and riotous decoration’.22 Accordingly, the échelle of three detachable ribbons placed vertically on the bodice of this twilled cotton dress corresponds with ‘the three-dimensional ornamentation of the dress that was an essential part of the rococo’.23 Combined with the classical rose patterns and the robe à la française emulated skirt with a matching petticoat on which pale yellow lace trims separate the skirts into three parts, as if the petticoat were being in front, these qualities of the dress bear resemblances to the dress the Marquise wears in the famous portraits by François Boucher (1756). The back of the dress, however, is bustled. Although it was not an invention of the Victorian period, the bustle became a fashionable part of women’s dress between 1882 and 1889.24 According to Toby Slade, Japan’s first attempt to incorporate European women’s dress in the 1880s was unsuccessful largely due to the bustle style and its ‘extreme deviation’ from the body’s natural shape.25 Therefore, it is deducible that the bustle has a connotation of the late nineteenth-century European dress forms in Japan. The bustle was often paired with a long skirt, and even influenced children’s dress in the late Victorian period. From today’s perspective, young girls’ dress styles in this period have an air of maturity. Elizabeth Ewing described the dresses of young girls in Europe at the time as ‘tight, cramping and devoid of youthfulness, down to the elaborate tight, buttoned boots or the even more elaborate ones made of satin and laced up over open fronts’.26 As noted in the previous chapter, until the 1920s, age and class hierarchies of female dress style in Europe were largely maintained through the length of skirts. Only very young girls or lower-class women would wear short skirts, and skirts lengthened as the age of the wearer.27 Thus, the short ‘little girl’ skirt emphasizes the ‘infantile’ qualities of this Lolita dress, and hence accentuates ‘youthfulness’ or ‘girlishness’. This elucidates the kawaii aesthetics notable in Japan. Further Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. 112 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. significance of the ‘Pompadour bustle dress’ is added by the way in which amateur model Misako Aoki wears it in volume 13 of the magazine KERA MANIAX (Figure 5.1). She is pictured wearing the dress over a white, flounced blouse named ‘Ribbon Crown Tucked Blouse’ and an organdie pannier.28 Unlike the French Figure 5.1 Amateur model Misako Aoki dressed in Innocent World’s Pompadour bustle dress. KERA MANIAX 2009, 13, p. 16. Photography: Tetsuji Shibasaki, Hair and make-up: Akio Namiki (Clara System), Text: Emi Uemura, Design: Akiyoshi Akira Design, Model: Misako Aoki. Courtesy of Mariko Suzuki/Jacke Media Japan. Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. RIBBONS AND LACE 113 court dress, this Lolita dress has no sleeves, and wearing it over a blouse might avoid the exposure of cleavage. For more Victorian references, Victorian Maiden’s ‘Rose Lace Blouse Dress’ offers a long-sleeved, bell-shaped, calf-length dress with tulle lace and a tucked yoke made of cotton lawn cloth. The tucked yoke and long sleeves of a blouse allude to the style of the Victorian era, particularly in the 1890s. Yet the outfits suggested by the brand include wearing a puff-sleeved dress over the very dress and layers of pannier under it in order to accentuate further a bell-shaped effect, again highlighting the style’s ‘appropriated’ quality. Judging from its appearance, a Lolita pannier can be described more precisely as a hooped petticoat of the twentieth century rather than the authentic eighteenthcentury French garment. Further adding to this mix of appropriation and ‘trans-periodic’ quality, one might argue that these Lolita dresses’ silhouettes are stylistically closer to a 1950s American formal gown – as immortalized by the prom dress. While the American dress was popular at the same time in Japan, and again briefly in the late 1970s, Lolita style has rarely been considered in relation to American culture, either by Lolita brands or the community. Instead, the style is commonly correlated with historical Europe, reinforced by descriptive terms such as princess, maiden and ballerina. Indeed, Isaac Gagné notes in his study of Lolita style that ‘the meaning of the fashion is to become a “princess”’.29 Arguably, what is important for the style is the opulent feeling created through the emphatically hooped skirt, produced by wearing layers of filmy undergarments à la Marie Antoinette. In this sense, while the actual shape of the dress is considerably more contemporary, it aspires to the quintessence of rococo aesthetic sensibilities, namely ‘frills, ribbons and flounce’.30 The authenticity of historical European dresses has also been negotiated in terms of practicability suited to our time. The calf-length dress, made of such fabrics as cotton or nylon, hooped with the (petticoat-like) pannier, is lighter, less restrictive and more affordable than a long, full-length velvet, silk or wool dress with a heavier crinoline would be. The use of panniers can create a more opulent, aristocratic feel, and for aesthetic reasons, the layers of cotton tulle or nylon sheer bear a striking resemblance to a bell-shaped ballet skirt.31 Lolita style may therefore be a negotiation between the fashion aesthetics of early/modern Europe and the kind of functionality appreciated at the turn of the twenty-first century. Rather than being unfamiliar with European sartorial history, some Japanese designers have studied European dress history at university, and thus are able to reference strategically certain aspects of historical European dress, producing something new.32 It indicates the degrees to which Japanese designers are able to make decisions and exercise creative control. Hence, transnational appropriation, as Margaret Maynard has said, can be systematic and tactical rather than ‘chaotic’. Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. 114 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES Another notable characteristic of Lolita style is its emphatic display of sweet, almost infantile, girlish aesthetics. Lolita adds a shade of girlish style favoured in Japan – notably a kawaii (cute) aesthetic – to a frilly European aristocratic dress form. Mixed with kawaii aesthetics, Lolita reinvents historical European dresses as something novel and girlish. The projection of the kawaii aesthetic as embodied by the shortened length of skirts, exemplifies a conscious, creative adoption of foreign cultural forms. The demure aesthetics of the style can evoke a sense of docility for those who are not familiar with this fashion. In that case, it is logical to question whether or not this opulently ornate, girlish fashion endorses female subservience and eroticization. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. Decorative femininity: praises and criticism Women’s elaborate dresses in nineteenth-century Europe, by which Lolita style is partially inspired, have been perceived as symbolic of feminine oppression.33 This is explicated in two ways: firstly, the economic dependency of bourgeoise women rendered them a property, a living index of the pecuniary strength of men, by being adorned in lavishly ornamental dresses. This has contributed to the assumption that such sartorial ornamentation was a stable signifier of female dependency and subservience.34 Secondly, in order to attract such financially stable men, women were, it is believed, forced to rely on their physical allure, and their clothes would serve that purpose to the maximum degree.35 As a result, the decorative woman was presumed to symbolize female subservience as well as the source of the man’s erotic pleasure. We might wonder, then, whether or not Lolita style’s opulent use of lace, ribbons and flounces, which both imposes a degree of physical restraint and makes the wearer an object of the spectator’s gaze, endorses similar preconceptions. The question is made more pertinent by the dominantly girlish qualities of the fashion. This is because not only feminine fashion but also ‘girlish femininity’ itself has been perceived negatively, particularly but not exclusively in Anglophone cultures. Girls, and the connected concept of ‘girlhood’ are frequently perceived as being associated with passivity and vulnerability.36 The adolescent female body is both commodified and glorified as the ideal sexual body in popular culture at the same time the institutional spheres such as schools and family perceive the female body as ‘a tainted body need of control’.37 Media portrayal of adolescent girls moreover, often arouses social concerns relating to the promotion of sexual precocity in teenage girls, but such perspectives themselves are through the lens of the voyeuristic gaze of adults.38 Consequently, the voices of girls with senses of agency and positive attitudes are frequently disregarded.39 In order to claim a position of power, some girls even adopt overtly ‘masculine and boyish’ Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. RIBBONS AND LACE 115 demeanours and ‘differentiate’ themselves from more ‘girlish’ or ‘normatively feminine’ girls who are regarded as dull and unfavourable.40 It can be deduced from these ideas that despite the largely constructed nature of both genders, conventional ‘masculinity’, even if it is on the side of ‘hypermasculine’, tends to be seen as a ‘natural’ quality of human beings. By contrast, conventional ‘femininity’ is seen as ‘gendered’, and hence is ‘crafted’. Indeed, the concept of being ‘genderless’ is itself often adjusted to one particular image of white, heterosexual and ‘masculine’. Blindly seeking and attempting to apply this concept to any individuals who do not fit into that type can, therefore, result in undermining their senses of freedom and individuality.41 Although this kind of political interpretation of women’s dress, particularly the ornate kinds, has been challenged in recent times, it is nevertheless still prevalent. Sheila Jeffreys, for instance, writes as recently as in 2005 that differences inscribed in what men and women wear demarcate sexual differences between the two genders, and women’s clothes turn their wearer ‘into toys to create sexual excitement in’ men.42 From the perspective that sees ‘feminine’ clothes as creating and recreating a conventional, negative image of ‘femininity’, Lolita style is a reification of unfavourable female passivity and objectification. However, most of those who indulge in this romantic sartorial aesthetics, regardless of their nationality, strongly deny these assumptions.43 It is generally assumed that Lolita style is largely ‘pre-sexual’ despite the possibility of the style veering into the sexualized.44 One of the shop staff at Baby in Japan who dresses in the style regularly, for instance, has said her initial motivation to dress in Lolita was a desire to wear cute, doll-like clothes.45 Elsewhere, I have argued that Japanese Lolitas ‘tend to endorse the egoism and cruelty associated with childhood rather than its innocence, naiveté or submissiveness’.46 Moreover, ‘[a]bstinence, girlishness, and virginity’ – albeit qualities often considered sexually desirable in various societies – have characterized this style in late 1990s Japan, in contrast to the overt sexual connotations ascribed to Nabokov’s novel, from which the name of the style was drawn.47 My intention here is not to deny women’s desire to attract admirers via fashion or appearance. It might, of course, appeal to certain fetishist tastes, and it is also possible for some women to deploy Lolita style to attract sexual attention, but this does not seem to be the aim for most Lolita wearers.48 Assuming these dresses merely endorsed feminine oppression is rather simplistic. Wilson argues that ‘to understand all “uncomfortable” dress as merely one aspect of the oppression of women is fatally to oversimplify, since dress is not and never has been primarily functional and is certainly not natural’.49 Moreover, ‘what may be considered “functional” dress in one epoch or culture may not be so in another’.50 Anne Hollander points out that ‘[c]omfort, which in clothing is a mental rather than a physical condition, was no more likely to be a matter of course in skimpy clothes than in voluminous ones’.51 This means that Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. 116 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES the length of a skirt or the decorativeness of a dress might not, at least significantly, influence the utility of the clothing. Her view is rendered credible by what Entwistle has noted. Although generally overlooked, she writes, there is a degree of discomfort attached to ‘the tight, fitted male clothes’ as well.52 Similarly, while voluminous, crinoline skirts and corsets of nineteenth-century Europe (by which Lolita style has been influenced) have been perceived by some as a sartorial incarnation of imposed female docility, women’s senses of agency, not their passivity, are also evident even in women’s fashion in this era.53 Repudiating the idea that wearing an ornate dress simply implies Victorian women’s consent to submission, Steele argues that neither upper-class men nor women’s clothes at the time in Europe were practical, as they were not designed for manual labour.54 More significantly, the silhouette of such florid, embellished women’s dresses ‘might be interpreted as emphasizing the female presence in a way that male clothing singularly failed to do’.55 Smith, in Ladies of the Leisure Class (1981), has also suggested that voluminous decoration of women’s dresses in the mid-to-late 1800s might have given the wearers some degree of power and visibility. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. Full skirts, bodices, huge sleeves gave substance to female claims to importance by increasing their physical size to at least double that of men. Women wearing hoop skirts, crinolines, bustles, or trains filled the social space and made people aware of their presence.56 Steele and Smith highlight the view that senses of agency and autonomy were thus involved when women wore ornate dresses.57 Steele also emphasizes that the significant meanings ascribed to women’s dress in the nineteenth century were far more complex, saying: ‘Victorian fashion expressed neither the social and sexual repression of women nor male perceptions of them as primarily sexual beings.’58 She argues that the Victorian woman’s emulation of an ideal of beauty, even if it came with limitations, should be understood more ‘as a personal choice or an aspect of women’s selfdevelopment than as a part of their oppression as “sex objects”’.59 This is because ‘women dressed not only for men or against other women, but also for themselves’.60 This means that Victorian women likely dressed in such a way because they believed the fashion would make them look and feel pretty. In other words, they would feel pleasant, or even cosy via the sensation of being ‘welldressed’.61 The aesthetic value of clothing is one of the fundamental factors ruling our selection of clothes. Thus the aesthetic importance of clothing should not be underestimated. If comfort is seen as one of the functions of clothing, wearing clothes that match our aesthetic sensibilities would surely and significantly increase the functionality of the clothes. This preposition is quite plausibly applicable to Lolita fashion. Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. RIBBONS AND LACE 117 The sense of agency combined with a highly girlish fashion style has moreover been a notable characteristic in Japanese popular culture. Anthropologist Anne Allison points out that the assumption of a ‘masculine’ demeanour is required not only for male heroes but also for female heroes in American popular culture. According to her: the preferred model of superheroism (in both fantasy and ‘real’ realms) remains strongly masculine in the United States and strongly biased against a female hero, particularly one who behaves in a feminine or girlie manner. There is also an implicit message that even if a superhero is a girl, she is expected to act, and even look, like a boy.62 Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. In contrast, ‘feminine’, ‘girlie’ or ‘cute’ appearances are not necessarily incompatible with independent strong women in Japanese popular culture.63 Allison’s interpretation of the Japanese animated series Sailor Moon, for example, illustrates that in contrast to the singular, masculine model of American heroism, ‘there are two different hero models operating, one male and one female’ in Japanese culture.64 It is my belief that Tetsuya Nakashima’s film Shimotsuma Monogatari and its portrayal of a young woman who is almost totally dressed in Lolita fashion offer a visual rendition of this point.65 Such a representation, it is argued, can serve as a largely positive and favourable alternative to the monolithic idea that perceives girlish/feminine appearances as endorsing passive objectification. I examine this film in the next section in order to substantiate this point.66 A Lolita girl in the countryside: dress and Shimotsuma Monogatari Shimotsuma Monogatari (2004) is a film adaptation of Novala Takemoto’s novel of the same title (2002). The film was a success at the box office and has established a somewhat cult status outside Japan. The story of the film can be briefly summarized in the following way. Momoko Ryū gasaki (played by pop idol and actress Fukada) is a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl, and a daughter of a failed yakuza and bar hostess. Although she lives in the rural Ibaraki Prefecture with her good-for-nothing father and his eccentric mother, Momoko dresses in the clothing of Baby, The Stars Shine Bright.67 She identifies with French rococo culture, and despite the curious eyes of the locals, lives according to her rococo aesthetics (e.g. she refuses to ride a bicycle simply because it is against her aesthetic principles, and she carries a parasol whenever she is outside in order to avoid sunburn). One day, after falling into a financial crisis that prevents her from purchasing expensive Baby garments, she decides to sell off the cheap and Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. 118 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES illegal imitations of Versace goods her father had produced earlier. Her advertisement attracts the attention of Ichigo Shirayuri (played by fashion model and rock singer Anna Tsuchiya), a seventeen-year-old student and a member of an all-girls bikie gang (yankee) ‘the Ponytails’.68 Seemingly situated almost at the other end of Lolita fashion, yankee style is generally known for its brazen gaudiness, combined with working-class clothes, modified school uniforms and other styles.69 Despite the fact that these two girls seem to be the exact opposite in character and in fashion taste, they somehow get closer as they spend time together, and embark on a journey to find a legendary embroiderer in the posh area of Daikanyama in Tokyo, in order to ask him to stitch a design on Ichigo’s bikie garment (tokkōfaku). From the very beginning, fashion propels the narrative in the film. Momoko’s father produces and sells cheap, ‘knock-off’ merchandise, which bears the misspelled name of Versach, thus incurring the family’s financial crisis and subsequent retirement to rural Shimotsuma. We learn that Momoko was born and raised in the industrial city of Amagasaki, which the film calls the ‘track suits paradise’ (jā ji tengoku). The hideously made ‘Versach’ garments introduce Ichigo and Momoko, who are initially, mutually surprised by the former’s démodé sukeban (female delinquent) sartorial style and the latter’s frilly, ‘infantile’ fashion. Embroidery brings the two heroines closer; Ichigo’s determination to find a legendary embroiderer in Daikanyama forces Momoko to spend time with her, while their friendship seriously develops when Ichigo requests Momoko to embroider the design on Ichigo’s garment instead.70 Momoko becomes anxious after being asked by the owner of Baby to embroider a design on a white lace Lolita dress. She reveals her vulnerability, only to be encouraged by Ichigo in a strong, loud voice. Clearly, clothing functions as an essential driving force of the narrative in Shimotsuma. In order to examine the significant meanings of Lolita fashion in this film, it is useful first to observe what roles dress in general plays in it, and how it is connected to the identity and ideology of the wearer. Appearance says everything: dress and identity in Shimotsuma Monogatari Do the clothes that Momoko and Ichigo don represent their ‘true identities’ or do they instead offer the two protagonists a means to play with their identities? In the era of postmodern thinking, we tend to assume that identity is a masquerade and has an essentially instable and fragmented nature. This means that rather than being inherent, ‘one’s identity is defined in terms of the image that one creates through one’s consumption of goods, including the clothes one wears’.71 Llewellyn Negrin argues that this is not an entirely accurate reading because ‘[r]ather than just being about the creation of a “look”, the way one adorns Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. RIBBONS AND LACE 119 Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. oneself should reflect one’s values and beliefs’.72 In other words, one’s style of appearance refers to ‘the ideology of the wearer’.73 Somewhat more cautiously, Wilson suggests that dress and demeanours may allow us to assume a false or disguised identity.74 However, even our intention to don particular garments in order to disguise or adopt a false identity itself is a part of our identity. This is because it reflects and is intertwined with our desires and wills. Thus I argue that ultimately, dress is inextricable from our inner ‘self’. Likewise, Shimotsuma predominantly endorses the idea of fashion/appearance as carrying ‘the ideology of the wearer’. For example, in a sequence during their first encounter, Momoko is dressed up for a meeting with a new person, Ichigo. Beginning with a red velvet headdress trimmed with white lace, roses and red ribbons, she is attired in Baby’s red velvet ‘Elizabeth’ dress with white flounce sleeves. As can be seen in Figure 5.2, its stomacher-like bodice has a lace and flounced yoke with the échelle of a red ribbon and white lace roses, while the bell-shaped, calf-length skirt has five tiers of white lace, revealing a pair of frilly high socks. Ichigo surprises Momoko with her school uniform worn in a 1980s’ sukeban style. With a short black jacket, which has rolled-up sleeves revealing a leopardpatterned lining, Ichigo’s sukeban look consists of a white shirt with a looselyknotted black tie, a very long black pleated skirt reaching to ankle level, kitsch Figure 5.2 Momoko and Ichigo’s first encounter. From Shimotsuma Monogatari (2004), directed by Tetsuya Nakashima, produced by Yuji Ishida, Takashi Hirano and Satoru Ogura. Toho Co., Ltd, Japan. Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. 120 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES red sunglasses and heavy make-up with particular attention to her drawn eyebrows, a typical characteristic of yankee style for women.75 Ichigo is in turn surprised by learning that a girl who glitters with lace and ribbons is in fact seventeen years old, the same age as herself, saying: ‘I figured only a child would wear that kind of frilly dress. But I shouldn’t judge by appearance.’ Momoko gently yet decidedly replies: ‘But appearance says everything’, reinforcing the idea that she conceives fashion/dress as reflective of identity. Momoko does almost anything to continue to purchase her favourite Baby items, even after falling into financial crisis. This alone indicates her perception of Lolita fashion (and more precisely Baby garments) as something much more than merely inessential, consumable pieces of cloth detached from her identity or the self. As for Ichigo, her purple tokkō fuku) is represented as almost synonymous with her soul. In the sequence where Momoko offers to embroider a design on Ichigo’s bikie garment after they had a quarrel, Ichigo accepts the offer, giving Momoko her garment. When Momoko asks Ichigo: ‘Can you really trust me?’, Ichigo, sitting astride her scooter in the rain, seriously replies: ‘To entrust your bikie garment to someone means to entrust your soul to that person’. Unlike their school peers, and despite their visible sartorial differences, Baby and yankee garments might also function as signifiers of the similarities between Momoko and Ichigo in Shimotsuma. Ichigo, like Momoko, has light-brown hair with rather embellished make-up, and rides a pink scooter, all of which undoubtedly renders her comparable to Momoko despite their clearly different sartorial preferences. Their commonalities are most evident in a sequence where the two girls are sitting face to face in the ‘Forest of the Aristocrats’ (kizoku no mori), a local tearoom. As Figure 5.3 indicates, Momoko’s demure posture, illuminated by her pale pink classical dress with frilled yoke and machinebrocaded ribbon-type textile, her matching straw hat adorned with a gauzy ribbon and rose corsages are strikingly juxtaposed with Ichigo’s casual posture. Ichigo’s deportment corresponds well with her hip-hop-meets-yankee fashion consisting of a loose red track suit, a matching hooded sweatshirt and a black singlet. Despite these sartorial differences, the two girls are equally shown in a medium shot, which, significantly, implies their equality, making a clear contrast to the scene where Momoko is seen with her classmates, to which I shall return later. This point endorses what Georg Simmel stated in The Philosophy of Fashion, that their fashion ‘establishes uniformity within itself, as well as differentiation from outsiders’.76 Momoko’s strong sense of independence impresses Ichigo, while Momoko begins to understand and respect Ichigo as an individual who strictly follows her own ‘principles’. Both heroines express their stringent loyalty to their philosophies, and hence their individuality through (rather) minor clothing styles. This very Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. RIBBONS AND LACE 121 Figure 5.3 Momoko and Ichigo at ‘Forest of the Aristocrats’. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. From Shimotsuma Monogatari (2004), directed by Tetsuya Nakashima, produced by Yuji Ishida, Takashi Hirano and Satoru Ogura. Toho Co., Ltd, Japan. practice, however, provides a sense of commonality, which draws the two girls visibly (if moderately) closer. If clothes are interrelated with identities in Shimotsuma, what is the significance of the frilly and lace Lolita dress by which Momoko is so fervently captivated? Considering the functionalist analysis of dress, the emphasized girlishness and the frilly and lace ornamentation of Lolita fashion might suggest it endorses a passive, restricted girlish femininity. Ichigo’s comparatively aggressive demeanour and rather unisex, loose-fitted silhouette of the yankee garments further accentuate the sweetness and girlish femininity of the style Momoko wears. Is Momoko a passive heroine who lacks a sense of autonomy/agency? Earlier in the film, Momoko claims: ‘I’ve got a puny grip, I can’t run fast or swim. But for the aesthetics of the rococo, the more delicate a girl becomes, the higher her value increases’. This principle echoes Veblen’s perception of the ‘Leisure Class’ in which ‘[t]he more the style and construction of a person’s clothes indicates a complete unsuitability for work. . . the greater would be [the] “reputability” of their wearer’.77 Michael Carter in Fashion Classics notes that for Veblen, women’s dress ‘goes even farther in the way of demonstrating the wearer’s abstinence from productive employment’.78 On one level, Lolita fashion, in which Momoko is thoroughly attired, is a tailor-made embodiment of Veblen’s philosophy of women’s dress. What makes the film and its portrayal of Momoko subversive of such a political interpretation can be explained in two ways. Notably, Momoko’s perception of rococo principles is largely a romanticized version of aristocratic aesthetics, and these do not pose any serious restriction of her sense of agency. Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. 122 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES Sweet reveries of the rococo: the rococo dreams of Momoko Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. According to Momoko’s narrating voiceover, her rococo aesthetics teach one that life is like candy, and that one should immerse oneself in a world of sweet dreams. For instance, Momoko explains that aristocratic ladies of the rococo period in eighteenth-century France had their waists laced as tightly as possible solely for aesthetic purposes. This would be regarded as a virtue even when they fainted due to dyspnea or suffocation. This almost ‘idiotic’ prioritization of aesthetics and apparent lack of functionality accords with Lolita fashion, although the latter displays some practical reinvention of period costumes. In fairness, we need to acknowledge that Momoko’s understanding of rococo culture is a romanticized version of the cultural movement. The rococo movement became notable in France in the 1730s, fully bloomed in the 1740s and began to wilt with the flowering of the neo-classical movement in the late 1760s. Fashion and art historian Aileen Ribeiro remarks that the rococo is the ‘most “feminine” period in the history of dress’79 and ‘was a princely and urban art form, which demonstrated a kind of opulence in taste sympathetic to absolute rule’.80 According to Ribeiro: It was a style characterised by wit and fantasy, by playful ornamentation, asymmetry and three-dimensional decoration. . .In terms of costume, the new style exemplified every fantasy about the essence of the feminine; everything undulates and curves, from the tightly curled hairstyles (a popular style was named tête de mouton, like a sheep’s fleece) decorated with a tiny, frivolous headdress called pompon (a few flowers, a scrap of lace, a glittering tremblant jewelled ornament which shivered as the wearer moved) to the dress itself, usually a sacque or a robe à la française with floating back drapery, and trimmed with ribbons and flowers in serpentine curves. With the aid of small hoops or hip pads, the silhouette formed a graceful pyramid.81 Thus, the qualities of the rococo movement can be summarized more or less as ‘feminine’, artificial and elegant, all of which correspond well with Momoko’s understanding of rococo aesthetics. Unquestionably, however, the rococo is far more complex than that, for not only the aristocrats in eighteenth-century France enjoyed the blessing of the rococo movement. Although the movement was most strongly identified with the court (particularly with the mistresses of Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour and Madame Du Barry, to be followed in the next reign by the iconic Marie Antoinette), Steele has demonstrated that the influences and presence of urban society were also notable in the rococo movement.82 Indeed, according to historian Stephen Jones, ‘not only the aristocracy, but the prosperity of the upper middle classes also made them ideal patrons of the arts’ during this period.83 Moreover, Madame de Pompadour, a paragon of the rococo Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. RIBBONS AND LACE 123 sensibilities, was a self-made aristocrat and patron of the arts, and both her tastes and life trajectory signified the subversion of hierarchal distinctions in class and gender.84 How did the rococo dresses differ from the dresses of peasant women? Social and cultural historian Daniel Roche’s study of popular dress in eighteenthcentury Paris gives a picture of what the labouring-class or peasant women in 1770 would have worn. According to him, women in this class were dressed in a fairly uniform way; many of them: Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. wore petticoats (or skirts, for the distinction between jupon and jupe is not always clear) loose smock and shirt; a corset indicated the superior ways of servants, girls working in the world of fashion, or the wives of good artisants. There were camisoles, some slightly superior low-cut dresses, a few mantlets, not many cloaks, but they all wore stockings, a good number of checked aprons, and the pairs of pockets essential to good housewives.85 Momoko’s idea of France of the rococo period as an opulently romantic, aristocratic aesthetic therefore comes only from the limited and idealized space of the aristocracy of the period. Further, superficiality at least, it seems that Momoko’s own version of rococo aesthetics both enhances and reinforces the assumed correlation between women’s ornate dress and their imposed subservience. What is significant about Shimotsuma Monogatari is, however, that Momoko’s dress does not operate to render her submissive or the object of the male gaze. I argue that three main factors contribute to this significance: the independence in the characterization of the heroine, the almost absence of romance in the narrative and the subsequent lack of objectifying male gaze, and Momoko’s abilities to travel between both established ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ activities effortlessly without undergoing any sartorial metamorphosis. I examine these factors below, beginning with the independent personality of Momoko. As we have seen, one of the points that assigns a negative attribute to elaborate ‘feminine’ fashion is that such a fashion signifies female restriction. Yet despite Lolita fashion’s signified impracticability and demure girlishness, Momoko’s activities are neither fully restricted nor impeded. On the contrary, she demonstrates a considerably independent personality. Frills for independence As the director Tetsuya Nakashima himself comments, Momoko has achieved a status of ‘independence’.86 As described by Ichigo, ‘Momoko always stands up for herself. She follows only her own rules.’ According to this proclamation, her Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. 124 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES sense of independence is well observed in the school lunch sequence, where we see Momoko having her lunch alone in the classroom. First and foremost, Momoko is visually distinct from her peers. In the medium-close shot, she faces the window, whereas her classmates are having their lunch in groups, portrayed in the long shot behind Momoko. Her blondish ringlets, delicate make-up and even her pink heart-shaped lunchbox filled with colourful sweets mark her ‘difference’ from the uniformly black-haired, simple-looking and thus more conservative classmates. Since Momoko is presented in contrast to her classmates, the film’s intention is clearly to affirm her alienation. This also positively highlights her independent mentality, as she is able to stand alone if necessary, in order to live by her own values and judgements. Momoko’s sense of independence and individuality does not originate from her actual rejection of conformity, but predominantly from her aesthetic principles. When Ichigo attempts to persuade Momoko to join her bikie gang, Momoko, refusing decidedly, states, ‘I won’t be a yankee, ride a bike, get in a fight or be in a group, and I won’t be shedding this [Lolita] dress’ because ‘it [the yankee] just looks tasteless’. This implies that her activities, including her sense of individuality and independence, are largely predicated on her own aesthetic principles. Momoko’s independence is, however, not as flawless as it appears. Towards the climax of the film, she reveals her weakness and vulnerability, seeking encouragement from others (notably Ichigo) rather than handling her anxieties by herself. As director Nakashima notes, she might immerse herself in Lolita style and strictly follow her romanticized rococo principles in order to avoid being hurt by interacting with other individuals.87 In this interpretation, Momoko’s adherence to the fashion style, and hence her ‘conformity’ to a (minority) fashion trend, symbolizes both her independence and her vulnerability. This intricacy manifested through the character of Momoko gainsays the one-dimensional image of dependent women who are opulent trophies of their male breadwinners while pointing to the ‘power’ such decorative girlish fashion holds. Her independent status is further highlighted by the almost entire absence of romantic narrative in the film. This is significant because the lack of romantic narrative alludes to the conclusion that Momoko’s immaculately crafted ‘look’ does not operate primarily for the male gaze. Valiant be the sweet maidens: girls propelling the narrative Shimotsuma Monogatari challenges a common conception that romance is an essential aspect of culture concerning adolescent girls, let alone film.88 Romantic heterosexual elements in Shimotsuma are, in contrast, largely absent. The only romantic element that involves the two protagonists is the episode of Ichigo’s Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. RIBBONS AND LACE 125 first love.89 The comical visual elements of Ryū ji (Sadao Abe), Ichigo’s romantic interest, prevent him from being perceived as an attractive male character in a traditional sense by the audience. Those elements instead trivialize the romantic aspect in the film, with the exception of the sequence where Ichigo cries after learning that he is in fact the fiancé of Akimi (played by Eiko Koike), the respected leader of Ichigo’s bikie gang. This sequence in turn highlights the bond between Momoko and Ichigo. From this moment, Momoko begins to understand and respect Ichigo as an individual who strictly follows her own principles, such as ‘girls shouldn’t cry in front of anybody’. Like Ridley Scott’s renowned film Thelma and Louise (1991), the activities of the two protagonists are predicated almost entirely on their mutual friendship and personal desires in Shimotsuma. This seemingly endorses the idea that at any age, people in Japan tend to find emotional stability in a range of more ‘permanent’ relationships than sexual relationships, such as friendships and group memberships, than Americans are believed to do.90 In contrast to the portrayal of Ryū ji, Ichigo frequently engages her status as a ‘romantic hero’. Although neither intelligent nor clever, Ichigo is portrayed as violent, rough, ardent, straightforward, masculine and loyal. Her habits of spitting and head butting are unquestionably associated with men and conventional ‘masculinity’. Ichigo also comes to Momoko’s rescue when she is in trouble, first when she faints with bliss after meeting her ‘god’ Isobe (Yoshinori Okada), and more significantly, when Momoko is troubled by Isobe’s request to stitch a rose pattern on his latest product sample. The film’s celebration of female camaraderie might carry different connotations for certain groups of lesbian, heterosexual female or heterosexual male audiences. Although such a reading is not completely absent, an analysis of the film as a lesbian romance does not seem to be mainstream. I believe this is predicated largely on the film’s rather unsentimental portrayal of the female friendship, combined with its avoidance of (Momoko’s) misandrist attitudes, which are present in the original novel, and the integrated nature of ‘female friendship’ in Japanese popular culture. It may be argued that the relative absence of heterosexual romance in Shimotsuma, just like the Japanese music videos analysed in Chapter 4, exonerates the two protagonists from obvious eroticization. Momoko and Ichigo are the ones who are in charge of controlling and propelling the narrative, and they are the ones with whom the audience is most likely to identify. Applying Laura Mulvey’s famous theory of the gaze, this enables the (female) audience to engage with Momoko and Ichigo in the ego-libido way – taking pleasures by empathizing with the protagonists in the film. In addition, since the two protagonists are young women, the female audience is not likely to be required to be involved in the process of ‘masculinization’ in order to derive pleasures from empathizing with the protagonists. According to this reading, Shimotsuma Monogatari refuses to allow Momoko and Ichigo to become objects Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. 126 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES of the camera’s traditionally male gaze. In contrast to Simone de Beauvoir’s contention that women’s preoccupation with fashion and appearance symbolized their enslavement by the objectifying male gaze, Momoko is moreover portrayed as not preoccupied with attracting the gaze of men.91 Importantly, Momoko’s Lolita fashion itself may be operating against eroticization. This is because ornaments such as frills and ribbons can simultaneously emphasize girlishness and draw attention away from the body of the wearer by concealing its shape.92 This idea that ornate feminine dress diminishes eroticism is also applicable to films. As film studies scholar Stella Bruzzi argues of Jean Paul Gaultier’s costumes in Pedro Almodóvar’s Kika (1993), elaborate feminine fashion in cinema can ‘diminish’ heterosexual allure and sexual desirability of the wearer. This is because ‘the more sensational clothes become, the less they signify the beauty and desirability of. . . the female characters who wear them. This contravenes directly the traditional interpretation of adornment as something which accentuates and complements the feminine’.93 According to this logic, clothes in the film, let alone Momoko’s highly ornate dresses, are not ‘dictated by the fundamental desires of the opposite sex’ as dress historian James Laver contended in his famous principles of Hierarch and Seduction (1950).94 It is, however, also possible to read Lolita dresses in a different, almost opposite way. Clothes can sexualize the body of the wearer, for instance, not only by revealing but also by hiding the body, and hence adding a sense of mystery.95 Although contemporary Japanese culture locates sexuality in the body, nudity has not been important in the history of Japanese aesthetics. Traditionally, the nape (unaji) was an anatomical part of woman’s body that exuded sensuality to the highest degree.96 The kimono silhouette focused attention on the neck by wrapping the body and making a flat, straight look while de-emphasizing other body parts such as the breasts, waist and limbs.97 In this sense, putting intricate layers between the gaze and the object hardly draws attention ‘away’ from the object, because if that object is understood as ‘hidden’, it might merely serve as a promise, or titillation. Considering these cultural complexities, I believe it is safe to contend that the ornate, girlish fashion in Shimotsuma is not a device to intentionally or primarily render the wearer an exclusive object of the objectifying gaze, although some viewers might find the fashion, or more precisely the image of Fukada in Lolita dress, to be erotically charged. The romantic chemistry between the two female protagonists in this film, with Ichigo’s apparent assumption of the ‘masculine’ role, displays a distinct influence of Japanese shoˉ jo novels, which can be traced back to the early 1900s. It is worthwhile to observe this tradition in the present setting. This is because the film’s modern take of this tradition sometimes inverts, and even subverts, assumed gender roles, and makes the film’s depiction of youthful femininity even more complex. Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. RIBBONS AND LACE 127 Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. A romantic camaraderie of girls The romantic friendship between girls is an ongoing theme in Japanese girls’ culture. Such relationships have been most obviously associated with shōjo literature in the early 1900s, with the author Nobuko Yoshiya (1896–1973) the main exponent of the genre, but they continue to be part of Japanese shōjo manga culture even today. These romantic relationships often involve two girls – one of them being tall, active, independent and handsome, while the other is petite, girlish, sweet and innocent.98 To some extent, these girls represent idealized images of ideological ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. Until the 1990s, such relationships were depicted as short-lived, for these girls were soon integrated into heterosexual romance or, if the story ended tragically, the former girl died for the latter girl.99 Unlike the original novel, the friendship between the two protagonists in the film version of Shimotsuma is not as romantic and sensual as the one found in the novels of Yoshiya. It is, however, clear that the two protagonists exhibit notable aspects of the convention of ‘masculine-feminine’ girls. Visually, Momoko assumes the role of the ‘feminine’ girl in the tradition of romantic relationships between girls. She is portrayed as highly girlish with demure demeanour. Most of the time she is dressed entirely in Lolita fashion, which is a signifier of hyperbolic girlish femininity. This fashion matches her use of polite language in a softly spoken voice. The casting of Fukada, whose public image is often described as gentle and quiet, further enforces this image. In contrast, Ichigo, played by popular fashion model Anna Tsuchiya, is characterized by her (relatively) tall build with manly attitudes and frequent use of rough, masculine language, spoken in a deep, husky voice. All of these qualities signify her status as the ‘masculine’ girl in the tradition of girl-girl romantic friendship. What makes this film unique, however, is its play on this tradition, as the two protagonists’ ‘gender’ roles are frequently switched. Performing masculin féminin It is significant that the film’s two protagonists sometimes assert themselves through (reaffirming) traditionally feminine qualities and values, which are presented as positive and powerful (such as caring, girlish fashion and embroidery), while they also engage in activities traditionally associated with men (fist-fighting, spitting, reckless driving and gambling). In other words, Momoko and Ichigo assume conventionally ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, active and passive roles alternately.100 This is particularly notable in the bonding scenes between the two girls, which are recurrent in Shimotsuma. In these sequences, the concept of bonding is nearly always interlaced with (traditionally) ‘female’ qualities. The Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. 128 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES concept of ‘bonding’ warrants special notice here: is it only a ‘masculine’ attribute? Although female friendship and bonding, let alone bonding between men and women, are common in reality, female bonding is, unlike male bonding, still rarely depicted in mainstream Hollywood films, with the notable exception of Thelma and Louise.101 This is because rather than showing female friendships, ‘traditionally, films portray women mainly in terms of their relationship to men’.102 Furthermore, most mainstream films that show female friendship are ‘sentimental’ films where women’s friendship is depicted largely as a means of integrating them into society.103 It must be noted that depictions of female friendship and bonding, particularly in relation to young women, are more common in contemporary Japanese cinema than they are in Hollywood.104 Furthermore, as the commentary of the director suggests, the bond between Momoko and Ichigo in Shimotsuma is significantly less ‘sentimental’ than more stereotypical, sentimental girl friendships.105 For this reason, Momoko and Ichigo’s bonding likely has a ‘masculine’ tone even in Japanese culture. The most significant of these ‘masculine/feminine’ juxtapositions is found in the climax sequence. We see Momoko clad in a simple, puff-sleeved, lacetrimmed white pinafore dress with decorative ribbon lacing on the bodice, wearing a white headdress, frilled high socks and a pair of white platform shoes similar to Vivienne Westwood’s Rockin’ Horse boots. As seen in Figure 5.4, she is driving her grandmother’s scooter fast. Her mission is to rescue Ichigo, who is facing the danger of severe punishment by her fellow bikie members for not fully conforming to the gang’s rules. After seeing her, Ichigo valiantly confronts and fights the bikie members, who are uniformly clad in tokkōfaku, and is then seriously bashed by them. Momoko just stands there in utter amazement when Ichigo’s blood splashes onto her and her white, frilly Lolita dress. She screams in a rather girlish fashion with her hands on her ears and cheeks. ‘Shut up!’ One of the bikie gangs throws Momoko into a large puddle. ‘Momoko!’ Ichigo shouts. Momoko, her entire body plastered with muddy water, rises with a sharp glare in a medium-close shot. Followed by a brief medium-long shot, the film offers a very close-up shot of Momoko’s face, initially with her eyes lowered, then looking up and staring straight, displaying a furious mien. Against the exuberant elegance of Strauss’s The Blue Danube and her softly spoken narration, which repeats, ‘Ideally, I would have been born in France in the rococo period’, Momoko reveals her aggression. She confronts the gang alone, first in a violent act by flourishing a metal baseball bat, then by using lies and manipulations, and eventually she saves Ichigo. Significantly, one scene after the fight sequence, we see Momoko return to her normal, girlish self. This highlights her smooth transformation from ‘girlish’ to ‘masculine’, and back to ‘girlish’. The film ends with a close-up of the two girls smiling girlishly, with their faces covered with bruises, blood and mud – another juxtaposition of ‘masculine’ Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. RIBBONS AND LACE 129 Figure 5.4 Clad in a white Lolita dress, Momoko drives a scooter with a serious mien. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. From Shimotsuma Monogatari (2004), directed by Tetsuya Nakashima, produced by Yuji Ishida, Takashi Hirano and Satoru Ogura. Toho Co., Ltd, Japan. and ‘feminine’ qualities, while their physical closeness might signify their emotional closeness. What draws my attention here is that Momoko’s transformation from ‘girlish’ to ‘masculine’ and back to ‘girlish’ in the fistfight scene involves no sartorial metamorphosis. The significance of sartorial transformation is accentuated in the convention of American superhero genre, from Superman and Spiderman to the film The Matrix (1999).106 This seemingly affirms the tradition of comic-book superheroes, for whom costume operates as ‘a conductor for channelling powers’,107 and ‘in which changing “into costume” functions as a “sign of inner change” from wimp to superhero’.108 According to cultural historian Friedrich Weltzien, changing dress as a presentation of masculinity has traditionally been depicted within the context of fighting in this genre.109 Manliness is therefore ‘defined by the virtues of the warrior, at the same time tested and confirmed by violence’.110 Following this logic, I deduce that Momoko’s transformation in this sequence without any significant sartorial change apart from the stains of her dress with mud, water and blood elucidates her inner changelessness. This means that both ‘girlish’ and ‘masculine’ attributes are present in the character of Momoko. If we recall what Butler has said about gender performativity, neither ‘masculinity’ nor ‘femininity’ is fixedly inscribed on one’s body: Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. 130 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.111 Shimotsuma Monogatari and its portrayal of Momoko endorses Butler’s theory in a less radical but perhaps more effective fashion. The absence of sartorial metamorphosis in Shimotsuma offers an alternative to the idea that ‘gender’ is defined and redefined through clothes, while Momoko’s smooth crossing between the borders of the two gender categories substantiates the idea of the ‘gender’ boundary as both precarious and undefined. Equally significant is Shimotsuma’s portrayal of a teenage girl dressed in a highly girlish fashion engaging in the conventionally ‘masculine’ activity of aggression.112 This significance is further emphasised by such recent American films as Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) and James Mangold’s Knight and Day (2010). The principal female characters in these films, played by Mia Wasikowska and Cameron Diaz respectively, wear dresses with bell-shaped, more than calf-length skirts at times in the films. When they are seriously engaged with fighting, however, they undergo sartorial transformation either into a ‘masculine’ armour (in Alice) or a black, stylish trouser suit (in Knight). The implicit message that we might encode here is that despite the rather ‘unrealistic’ settings of these films, certain activities such as engaging in a fight while wearing highly ‘feminine’ or ‘girlish’ attires are next to unthinkable. This is particularly notable in Alice in the sequence where Alice, like the legendary Joan of Arc, wears a medieval or Renaissance-style armour in order to fight the dragon-like Jabberwocky. The medieval/Renaissance-style armour is integrated into the costume of American superheroes, which ‘is reminiscent of imperial Roman armour but with apparent Renaissance influences’.113 Thus, as Weltzien has argued, it can be a signifier of heroic masculinity. This raises the question: if a film is set in the world of nonsense where the heroine can shrink and grow tall or animals and other creatures can speak a human language, why can the heroine not defeat a monstrous creature while wearing the gauzy, blue or red dresses with flounces that she had on earlier in the film? The equation of power, activity and authority with the concept of ‘masculine’, and inactivity with the concept of ‘feminine’ is arguably in operation here. In reality, heavy Renaissance armour could be more physically impeding than a filmy dress, but the discomfort associated with men’s clothes has conveniently been overlooked.114 Hence, these examples from American cinema uphold the validity of Allison’s contention that in American popular culture, female heroes tend to dress and act in a ‘masculine’ fashion. On the contrary, as several authors have pointed out, even if with certain limitations, girlish/feminine appearances and traditionally ‘masculine’ attributes such as fighting are more compatible in Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. RIBBONS AND LACE 131 Japanese popular culture. With a young woman in a white gauzy dress who valiantly fights in order to save her friend, Shimotsuma is a vivid endorsement of this point. It is simplistic to assume that these are only fictions, thus not mirroring reality in any ways. Crane and Bulman assert that the constructed ideals, biases or distortions demonstrated in cinema can themselves be part of the society/culture which first produced them.115 ‘Although the fantasy world of the cinema is obviously separate from the actual conditions of everyday life’, writes sociologist Joanne Finkelstein: Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. the intermingling of fashions with aesthetic injunctions about femininity and masculinity suggests that such images function mimetically. . . The close correspondence between women’s fashions and cinematic depictions of femininity illustrates how the imagined and the imitated flow into one another.116 As these ideas affirm, the comparison between the American films and Shimotsuma Monogatari illustrate transcultural differences in conceiving the relationship between ‘feminine’ clothing forms and strong activity. Further affirmation of this point can be found in the fact that Shimotsuma Monogatari is not a single example of this kind in Japanese popular culture. Kozueko Morimoto’s manga series Deka One-ko (Detective One-ko or Wan-ko, 2008 to the present) is a new addition to this plethora of ‘girlish’ heroines dwelling in conventionally ‘masculine’ genres in Japanese popular culture. It centres around a newly recruited young female detective, Ichiko Hanamori, who is blessed with olfaction as acute as a police dog, a genetic inheritance from her father that enables her to solve crime cases.117 She is dressed in a frilly dress all the time, which is stylistically not dissimilar to Lolita fashion. An earlier TV drama series Fugō Keiji (Multi-millionaire Detective, 2005–6), in which a young granddaughter of a multi-millionaire joins the police force, might have inspired the comic book series. The heroine Miwako, also played by Fukada, is dressed in a less frilly but equally opulent, ‘feminine’ fashion.118 Although the author Morimoto has never described the heroine’s style as Lolita, and perhaps it is not the genuine Lolita style in the strict sense, Ichiko’s style is often named as Lolita.119 When the story was adapted for the small screen in 2011, such renowned Lolita brands as Putumayo (est. 1987, punk-Lolita) and Angelic Pretty (est. 1979, sweet-Lolita) offered their clothes, further circulating the conception that this is the story of a female detective clad in Lolita-like fashion.120 Like Shimotsuma, Deka One-ko further reinforces the idea that in Japanese popular culture, a young woman does not necessarily have to leave her opulent, highly ‘girlish’ clothes at home in order to engage in traditionally ‘masculine’ activities. Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. 132 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES The manifestation of conventionally ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ attributes through the character of Momoko in Shimotsuma poses another question: does the characterization of Momoko, for whom the Lolita fashion is a fundamental component, delineate a sense of ‘androgyny’? Lolita fashion, perhaps with the exception of the ‘count (oˉ ji)’ style, accentuates ‘hyper-girlish femininity’. Lolita fashion can moreover be understood as ‘exclusively a culture for girls – boys are not allowed’.121 All of this implies that Momoko could not be understood in terms of ‘androgyny’. In the social-psychological definition of ‘androgyny’, however, the answer can be affirmative. Refashioning the ‘androgynous’ look Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. Social-psychological analysis implies a possibility that the concept of ‘androgyny’ might be manifested through women with fairly ‘feminine’ appearances or men with comparatively ‘masculine’ appearances. By making distinctions from biological hermaphrodites, such an analysis conceptualizes androgyny as a psychological state. It refers ‘to a specific way of joining the “masculine” and “feminine” aspects of a single human being’.122 And this unison takes place largely in an idealistic way. For instance, Jungian analyst June Singer argued that: Men and women function in certain ways; each has masculine and feminine functioning capacities. In the process of living, these qualities, which for want of a better name we call ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine,’ are also convertible. The difference is that the conversions may proceed in a single direction as with our plane, or the conversions may move backwards and forwards, oscillating so swiftly that it is impossible to discern when ‘masculine’ functioning is in the superior position, and when ‘feminine’.123 This is significant since ‘[t]he inner sexual duality has nearly always been taken for granted’.124 Bem, who is noted for her influential work on androgyny, defines ‘androgynous’ individuals as possessing both stereotypically ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ qualities, unlike strongly sex-typed individuals.125 Her research indicates that ‘androgynous’ individuals are able to ‘engage freely in both masculine and feminine behaviours’ and thus ‘come to define a new and more human standard of psychological health’.126 Such analysis of ‘androgyny’ does not by any means subvert the concept of gender. Rather, ‘androgynous’ individuals psychologically possess and display attributes of both gender categories without much conflict. Although these psychological analyses of ‘androgyny’ date from the 1970s, they are still of considerable relevance for the conception of gender today. Carrie Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. RIBBONS AND LACE 133 Paechter, for instance, points out that we are unlikely to diverge from two main genders, despite the indefinable nature of gender. Each of us knows whether we are biologically male or female, or otherwise, something different or in between.127 However, as argued by Bem and Singer, many individuals possess both conventionally ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ qualities. Thus it is important to treat masculinities and femininities ‘only as aspects of identity, and . . . not insist that [identity] depends on them entirely, with one’s sense of oneself as male or female as somehow secondary’.128 In simplest terms, ‘androgyny’ describes a psychological state that is not strongly or dominantly assigned to one category of gender. Bem also notes that ‘[d]efined as gender inappropriate for females, for instance, is the desire for autonomy and power; defined as gender inappropriate for males are feelings of vulnerability, dependency, and affection for same-sex others’.129 I have demonstrated that all the qualities Bem noted are unified in the characters of Momoko and Ichigo. The emphasis of this ‘androgynous’ representation is highlighted by an established idea of androgynous appearance. When it is applied to describe clothing styles or the ‘look’, ‘androgynous’ appearance is, first and foremost, based on male clothes.130 While the term androgyny means the combination of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits (andr- from the word meaning man and gyné meaning woman in Greek), in modern times, the ‘androgynous’ look often means both men and women dressing in men’s clothes. ‘Female androgyny’ as an aesthetically pleasing look, Hollander argues, may not aim to render women as looking fully ‘masculine’, but its appeal lies in women’s assumption of a kind of beauty associated with the sexual uncertainty of the adolescent boy.131 This means that the look of an adolescent boy is perceived as connoting sexual ambiguity, while that of an adolescent girl is not. In other words, the clothes that visibly connote ‘girlishness’ are highly gendered, and are not considered ‘androgynous’. Shimotsuma Monogatari, on the other hand, endorses the ideas that despite the fixity in our biological gender, all of us have both conventionally ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ attributes. Hence, young women can display a sense of ‘androgyny’ while being fully clad in a highly ornate girlish fashion, without voluntarily embracing unwanted passivity or eroticization. The film’s portrayal of an adolescent girl in full activity, dressed in highly ornamental dresses, suggests that exquisitely frilled mini-dresses, platform shoes or a lace, white headdress are by no means less facilitative of movement, less worthy, less essential than more ‘masculine’ kinds of garments as preferred by functionalist ideas. This inverts utilitarian considerations where ‘beauty became equated with or reduced to utility, the two being indistinguishable’.132 Like the Victorian women in Steele’s study, most women who wear Lolita style, both in film and in real life, do so by their own choice, for their own pleasures.133 Shimotsuma Monogatari and its portrayal of Lolita fashion thus subverts the idea that women’s fashion has a primary role to serve and please men’s erotic Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19. 134 JAPANESE FASHION CULTURES pleasures. This in turn repudiates the preconceived equation of decorative girlish dresses with derogatory female passivity. It is fair to say that the film sheds positive light upon our understanding of the disparaged feminine clothing style. Conclusion Copyright © 2014. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. All rights reserved. Far from recreating the established idea that links female sartorial ornamentation with subservience and repression, Shimotsuma Monogatari offers a portrayal of an adolescent girl who is glittering with lace and flounces while also being active and autonomous. In this film, dress not only functions as a visual embellishment of the narrative, but also represents the identity of the wearer. It is, then, significant that unlike the tradition of the American comic book superhero or girl films, the heroines display both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ gender attributes without undergoing any sartorial transformation. Girlish and ornamental dresses, in this sense, do not have to be devoid of significance, essentiality or substance. The emphasis of this film is particularly highlighted by the notion that films and dress can both reflect and shape the culture that creates them. In conclusion, my analysis of Shimotsuma Monogatari suggests that the film sheds positive light upon our understanding of the disparaged ornamental and ‘girlish’ sartorial style. This film offers us a new way to consider such emphatically girlish fashion styles with the extravagant opulence of ornamentation, and the aesthetic pleasures they manifest. Monden, Masafumi. Japanese Fashion Cultures : Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uts/detail.action?docID=1769103. Created from uts on 2017-10-17 00:01:19.