Winners of the “Exciting Group Award”
Take a deep breath.
"Hanging out with friends rules!"
While we are on the topic of time travel, pictures of the past and so on, let’s take a few moments to learn something from this picture.
For those of you who don’t understand Japanese, the headline on the right reads “Hanging out with friends rules!” (to put it into the young person’s parlance). The boxed caption reads; “Winners of the Exciting Group Award”, and the paragraph below talks about their friendship, their group-shopping, their “mysteriously well-coordinated yet unique fashion tastes” and the excitement, energy and youth they exude.
I managed to get hold of the April 18, 1989 Olive magazine. What a classic. This particular issue is the “National Street Fashion Awards” issue, with a bevy of stylists, advisors and people in the know choosing the most fashionably dressed girls (and boys) from the Japan’s 12 major cities.
This magazine is beautiful. It speaks to the generation that, riding on the coat-tails of their parents, experienced all of the benefits of the bubble economy while not having to deal with any of its subsequent nasty side-effects.
When I look around me now I am mostly thankful the asset-inflated bubble economy didn’t keep going. The logical extension of what these people were wearing is too hard and too disturbing to picture. A good, hard recession brought us back to basics and simple tailoring. However, with the recent upturn (in Tokyo’s economy at least) I fear the history will indeed repeat. Twenty-five years is a long time, after all.