Fruits

Rating:
Summary: Art in motion
Review: ...
I love the colors and textures and looks they combine. What makes me happiest about this book is the couples. I like to think of them planing their funky wardrobe, calling, texting, sifiting through stores and closets and the original FRUiTS zines and meeting each other and smiling as they check out what their friend has put together and visa versa. SO many jeans and t-shirts on the street today, comfortable yeah but its safe. All the pretty details from hair ribbons to hats and all the velvets and cottons and tweeds in between are wonderful to pour over. Its also artistically pleasing when you want to see colors collide and patterns mix. All those combos make you smile for different reasons. And even if you want to stay safe in un-eye popping outfits you get a real escape looking at these happy people. Its also nice that these really look like fun OUTFITS not costumes- you know this isn't some Halloween parade somewhere. Some of them are very comfortable looking some look painful! But they are never uninteresting. Combine this book with TOKYO A Certain Style and you feel like you have a great view on these people's lives- where they come from where they live, how they express themselves in fashion that looks like something everyone can have if they can stand the stares :) What a great book- even if you aren't into fashion its a great human view- we are walking this planet and have our bodies to give something to the view of others and these people want to give a lot more than just another person walking by- and since we'd be arrested walking around naked.... You want to say THANKS for the fun :)

Rating:
Summary: Art in motion
Review: ...
I love the colors and textures and looks they combine. What makes me happiest about this book is the couples. I like to think of them planing their funky wardrobe, calling, texting, sifiting through stores and closets and the original FRUiTS zines and meeting each other and smiling as they check out what their friend has put together and visa versa. SO many jeans and t-shirts on the street today, comfortable yeah but its safe. All the pretty details from hair ribbons to hats and all the velvets and cottons and tweeds in between are wonderful to pour over. Its also artistically pleasing when you want to see colors collide and patterns mix. All those combos make you smile for different reasons. And even if you want to stay safe in un-eye popping outfits you get a real escape looking at these happy people. Its also nice that these really look like fun OUTFITS not costumes- you know this isn't some Halloween parade somewhere. Some of them are very comfortable looking some look painful! But they are never uninteresting. Combine this book with TOKYO A Certain Style and you feel like you have a great view on these people's lives- where they come from where they live, how they express themselves in fashion that looks like something everyone can have if they can stand the stares :) What a great book- even if you aren't into fashion its a great human view- we are walking this planet and have our bodies to give something to the view of others and these people want to give a lot more than just another person walking by- and since we'd be arrested walking around naked.... You want to say THANKS for the fun :)

Rating:
Summary: Truly captures how young Japanese Teens dress
Review: After visiting Japan last year and having spent most of my time in Harajuku (where most of these pix were taken)--all i can say is this book truly captures how young Japanese teens dress. Hypercolored clothing, crazy extreme mismatching, a gaggle of plastic accessories, technotoys and unnatural hair color is standard-- it's anime character meets candyraver meets barbie in Super Mario land.

You may think these teens are the few "extreme" dressers in their society, but you're wrong. I would estimate that 80% of teens in Japan's metro areas dress this way, if not more extreme.

In fact, the teens in Fruits are a bit *subtle* compared to what is going on in Japanese fashion today. It's not uncommon to see girls in elaborate french maid outfits with metallic makeup walking out of the train station. Walking everywhere you see these hello kitty psycho sweethearts, riddled with fake blonde hair, white lipstick, and mile-high op-art platforms. I've turned a corner and seen gangs of japanese guys and girls looking like Bob Marley and Lauryn Hill, replete with fake black tan, dreads, ghetto fabulous hip hop gear and all. Scrupulous attention is paid to every part of the body. Only about 5% of Japanese girls i observed did NOT wear some kinda of intricate rainbow patterned/bejeweled nail art. And the best part is seeing all these vividly dressed youths swarming all around you in hordes.

Fruits, although on target for year 2001, is almost out of style now, given that Japanese fashion trends change every minute. If you can't get enough of Fruits, then you really need to take a trip to Japan (Tokyo) which I stress is vital for anyone in the fashion, arts, or other trend industry. It's like living in the future--talking toilets, automatic servamatrons, futurism galore, towns called Sunshine City, bridges named Rainbow Bridge--it's pop-culture infantilism crossbred with sophisticated technology, the most fascinating hybrid found only in Japan. I guarantee you will be visually stimulated and inspired to no end at the hallucinatory flourescence that is Japanese youth culture. Now go book that ticket.

Rating:
Summary: delicious fruits
Review: Ah to be young and colourful again!

This book is absolutely delicious! No unnecessary commentary, just pages after pages of full-length colourful pictures of the fashion fruits on the streets of tokyo. It is liberating to see these kids go wild with color. Something happened on the streets of Japan that gave them the permission to scream out their individuality, and their sense of humour and joy of life jumps out from the pages of this book. They are adorable, and funny, and rebelious without being offensive, and kooky, and free, colourful, sweet, innocent, sensual, alive ... and the book doesn't preach anything, doesn't try to explain, just acts as silent observer.

Excellent!

Rating:
Summary: Wow! This is insane!
Review: First of all, this is not a fashion book. Fashion has rules and boundaries. The way these Japanese teens dress is far too wild and random to be considered fashion. This book captures the essence of individuality and self-expression in the purest form. This book is a must buy for anyone interested in Japanese culture. It's also got a lot of great ideas for spicing up your own look. I was so inspired by this book that now I have blue hair. I'm not kidding!

Rating:
Summary: FRUITS Fractures Fashion As We Know It
Review: Forget everything you ever learned about fashion... Whether you have followed fashion religiously, or tried to run in the opposite direction as fast as you can, you will want to get your hands on a copy of this book. You will never look at your closet or wardrobe quite the same after this....

Taken from five years of one of Japan's leading youth/pop fashion magazines, FRUITS is page after full-color page of individually dressed Japanese (mostly) teenagers from the Harajuku district. What Westerners think of as fashion has only existed in Japan for the last fifty years, and didn't become truly fashionable until the 1980s and 1990s. The young people in this book are experimenting with clothing and image as hard as they know how. No combination is forbidden, be it color or pattern-related. No trend is untrendy, no color to bright/dark/pale, no hair color left unexplored, no shoes to big, no kitsch to kitschy, etc.

What we see here are the last 40 years of Western fashion, made accessible and popular almost simultaneously to a non-Western culture. The melding and contrast are individually unique, made more so by the standard name, age, and point of fashion questions asked of each model. I've studied fashion and have a degree in costume so I've seen lots of experimental or future fashion, but all of it pales compared to the fertile pages of FRUITS.

Rating:
Summary: Eye popping fashion passion (with a healthy does of humor)
Review: From the highly worshipped pages of Japan's premiere street fashion bible comes FRUITS, from the magazine of the same name, created and photographed by Shoichi Aoki. From its beginning in 1994, FRUITS magazine covered the wide world of street fashions sported by young Japanese crowd of the Tokyo suburbs. This edition of FRUITS, from Phaidon publishing, is a collection of full page portraits from the magazine. It's the first time many of these images have been published in the western world.

Be prepared to enter the wild and wacky world of Japanese street style; a mixture of thrift store chic, designer handbags and accessories, anime and manga color, traditional Japanese clothing and home created "couture", sure to grab your attention, if not to make you laugh out loud. Creativity and ideas abound (notice I didn't say they were all "good" ideas.) Witness fever pitched fashion passion, eye popping cartoon creations worn with complete self confidence. Getting your picture in FRUITS magazine is your fashion street cred badge of honor, and these kids pursue it with all the style muscle they can muster.

Rasta cowboys, EGL (elegant gothic Lolita) baby dolls, anime space cadets, rockabilly punks, designer samurais; these are but a few of the style hybrids on display. Mixing vintage finds, designer labels (like W<, Jean Paul Gaultier and the prolific influence of Vivienne Westwood), and their own customized experiments, these Japanese teens create a world where the only limit to style is their own imagination.

You need this book. It's that good.

Rating:
Summary: Fruits is a Fraud
Review: Fruits purports to be photos of people picked at random from the streets based on their unusual outfits. In my opinion, all the subjects are models, dressed by a designer. Maybe they thought that westerners would not notice that all or most of the women and men subjects are photographed more than once. Some show up again and again. In my opinion, the photographs are staged and the outfits are not the creations of the people who are photographed. Notice too, how all the outfits are top notch from head to toe. You would expect to see a few ugly or poor decisions if the photos were of real people. Take a look if you are interested in how to try and dupe the public.

Rating:
Summary: Fruits is a Fraud
Review: Fruits purports to be photos of people picked at random from the streets based on their unusual outfits. In my opinion, all the subjects are models, dressed by a designer. Maybe they thought that westerners would not notice that all or most of the women and men subjects are photographed more than once. Some show up again and again. In my opinion, the photographs are staged and the outfits are not the creations of the people who are photographed. Notice too, how all the outfits are top notch from head to toe. You would expect to see a few ugly or poor decisions if the photos were of real people. Take a look if you are interested in how to try and dupe the public.

Rating:
Summary: The Ultimate Anti-Depressant
Review: Having grown up in Harajuku myself I have witnessed the transformation of Japanese youth culture through the years. Harajuku's hokosha-tengoku (or hoko-ten:a wildly popular street hang out that used to be closed off to traffic on Sundays where most of these shots were taken)has always been an area where kids that did not fit into the conventional Japanese culture would come out and do their thing. What started out in the 70's as a forum for kids who dressed up as 50's rockabilly icons (the kids were content in just mimicking their American heroes) have decades later become an arena for the most outrageous fashion prophets of the new millenium. It is a pure joy to see my old neighborhood being chronicled by Aoki's masterful photography with his wry sense of humor. This journalistic celebration of the transmutated Japano-Western style is truely a kudos to the Japnese youths living in a tightly wound up homogeneous society. This book is a true testament to the enduring fact that individuality can survive despite the utmost societal and cultural pressure to conform.