agoraphobic fashion: karasuzoku, fur people, a little death around the eyes

get really happy about the term karasuzoku, or karasu-zoku, the crow tribe women who would wear the all black yamamoto kawakubo aesthetic. or this goth punk thing. but it seems little is written about it. the fashion book on japan design at the tate modern was took me to the term.

if only i could have enjoyed the museum more. all the surrealism. but you have to be willing to be completely trampled.

from wiki on zoku:

One of the Japanese manifestations of the 1970s punk movement was known as karasu-zoku, which translates as 'crow-tribe'. As the name suggests, the group in question expressed themselves by wearing black clothing and accessories, just as the goth subculture and some branches of the emo phenomena would be associated with this preference today.

i was long puzzling over a certain lovely look as it has evolved, huge swaths of baggy black, the very modern yamamoto rip, as if he wasnt ripping from punk and grunge as they evolved with eachother----in the early eighties. well----what do i know, i was just a child.

who wears it where: usually gay men wear it, and they are my fashion idols. worried that i cant see visibly a gay culture in stockholm, and wonder if there is here too much homophobia, or that people are just more shy? i miss it. viva LA, viva london. but they dont have fresh air like stockholm air. my body refuses to leave. it wants more air!

maybe it is different here. there is an extreme dandy look, that is quite mysterious and elaborate.

overnight it seems the stockholm girls are wearing these huge jumpery coats with wide sleeves, that are smocky and kind of sixties, but deconstructed, minimal, but the opposite of a form fitting trench. kind of mod too.

i love the sculptural elements of kawakubo, the against nature effect of too much cloth----
or as yamamoto said about the samurai resonance . . .

they pertain, loosely to the kawakubo effect.

or gareth pugh, he pertains too, loosely.

my wonderful japanese art history courses with . . . a wonderful formerly vegetarian zen buddhist scholar . . . from columbia via vanderbilt . . . whose name i have lost . . . was it christopher something?

in searching found this ridiculous article from 1996:

"techno-dwellings for the cyber-egos of the mega-rich" which has quite a ridiculous nineties ring to it . . .
http://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/04/nyregion/techno-dwellings-for-the-cyber-egos-of-the-mega-rich.html

how inspired often, i feel about this extremely minimal apartment design, from an architect with five identical jil sander suits, a chrome mini-fridge and lots of emptiness. a bed. it was this total minimalism----

it cleans out the brain, the emptiness
promotes creativity

i am shamefully addicted to the lovely rich ambiance of the nordiska kompaniet
http://www.nk.se/

i do not feel beautiful enough to be there!

they have tofu and goji berries and sencha tea in their gourmet food handle on the bottom floor.
but no internet!

too much fur, and too much chanel.

my inner austere communist revolts at the consumerism, but to go in and see all the beautiful girls made up and perfect, and the proper boys puzzling over what next they need . . . really some lovely boys stride through there . . .
its so funny to see skyscraper gorgeous boys with no ego, as opposed to the hyper-ego-ed-out LA model type, who might not be all that . . .
but really all the humans are lovely, all of them.
but certainly more fresh air and exercise does benefit the human. and less junk food. less cars.

found the comme des garcons temple incense, lovely, but too smokey

found a brand called all saints. i saw it in the otherwise sedate/oppressive edinburgh dept store, where briefly the tom ford perfumes revived me, or almost made me cry with nostalgia.

all saints: kind of obey.
http://www.allsaints.com/vintage/?sub_category_id=460&vintage=1&vintage_search=1

i was surprised to see such a wicked display of thin flimsy flowy trashicistic deconstructed ready to wear in all black and grey. and then in glasgow i saw their boutique, with its very singer machine decked industrial display. like i care. of the couture merits i cant argue, but the design is something better and more rocknroll than average. well made, and therefore out of my budget. and the pallette perfectly limited to grey and black and beige. a gal was wearing the most bizarre take on some turkish style pants and said she was selling loads of them. as if one could buy cool.

having poisoned my brain in los angeles, there is a certain attempt to replicate this sunset strip rock vibe. but its a universal, obviously. anarchy in the UK, or whatever.

or maybe its just a more specific topshop.

brand literacy---our lonely world.

the peter doherty song "a little death around the eyes" came to me, upon pondering the predicament of the fur people, the fur woman trolling the surreal department store.

she looked so sad and washed out and imprisoned, and covered in electrocuted fox carcasses, and accessorized with a not so impressive man, who obviously has no shame about animal cruelty, either.
i just began to sing this song . . .

and me, the most pathetic no frills person ever, did have some prada framed glasses, which were stolen in my london youth hostel, the moral of the story being, hail to the thief, and down with capitalism.

and what do i know.

i wont even wear a bra most of the time anymore, though i found the nicest ones to be made by a company called natori.
http://www.natori.com/Default.aspx

after a tough day reading law blogs and wikileaks and eating goji berries at the modern art museum, a look in the mirror, cheered me up. i look like any old karasuzoku plus or minus the yamamoto or feu.

and in that, there is a little comfort, androgyny, defiance, simplicity. where beauty might recover loss or lost sense of self, and my hello kitty band-aid is kawaii, if not environmental.

now if i can just get my hands on the right hemp natural dyed karasuzoku look, slouchy and black, asexual and clerical, i might get really happy.

i want to write something poetic called "fur people" about people who wear fur.

and really, as sad as i am about the police cane beating the striking workers in the H&M factories in bangladesh,
amazingly, H&M is offerring tons of organic and recycled fibers.
so that's nice.

i was told in stockholm, used fashion is cool for the ecological impact.

i immediately felt really guilty about my freshly dyed cheap leggings leeching toxic dye chemical into the brilliant water system and into me transdermally! but hey! they are so black!

as for the karasuzoku term, it seems to sit more generally in the tribal subculture ethos of harajuku fashion world, such that group ethos is therein expressed.
the zoku:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoku

being so solitary lately, where is the group ethos? the agoraphobia loves a city where no one speaks. loves the terms NEET and tajin kyofushu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taijin_kyofusho

i am thinking a lot about MIA, but then also allison mosshart, ladyhawke, and cool rock and roll girls who can be super tomboyish and gorgeous at the same time. a lot about the high necked tshirt five sizes too big, and these overshaped tshirts or those bat sleeves from the eighties.
for demonstation look at this cool blog written in french about japan fashion:
http://nagoya-en-francais.over-blog.com/categorie-11235360.html
the karasuzoku term seems also to pertain to some kind of cat burglars or mafia people who wear all black too.
http://gethiroshima.blogspot.com/2006/03/karasuzoku.html

collateral damage MIA remix