“Wait right there, young man! What do you think you are wearing?”
“Mom, Grandma got me this.”
“You think I am going to let you out of the house like that?”
“It’s clean. You just washed it. The other shirt is the stained one…”
“Where is the logo?”
“Mom, this is MUJI.”
“I got you a whole closet full of Louis Vuitton and you want to go out of the house in that and embarrass your father and mother after all we’ve done for you…”

Kids. They come out of the womb and immediately start killing your cool. They spit up and drool like they’ve never read a page from Emily Post. And the clothing…! I would rather give my BMW to charity than have my daughter wear Oshkosh B’gosh overalls.

The top tiers of Japanese society were starting to feel the very burn of inadequately class-identifying children’s apparel, and so media firm X-Knowledge has imported and localized the French children’s fashion magazine MilK. (I am not sure if you knew this, but all I’s in magazine titles must be lower-case — e.g., FRUiTS and CUTiE.) Maybe you can’t outfit your offspring in bespoke suits from Savile Row quite yet or don’t have the time to diamond-encrust your kindergartener’s randosel backpacks, but MilK Japon will give you tips on dressing your kids in APC, Paul & Joe, and Agnes B so they become one step closer in spirit to little beautiful blond children from the Continent.

MilK’s founder Isis-Colombe Combréas writes the following mission statement on the website for the French publication:

MilK, because we all feel something in common: nostalgic for our childhood. And here we are, new parents with a mission: to pass on a genuine education that also helps children to develop a taste for beautiful things. This transient moment, we want to live it together, like a hedonistic transition where each moment is an occasion to be an aesthete. Milk takes us on a modern journey through the world
of childhood. Both the photographs and illustrations reveal our desire to discover together the still unexplored world of children’s fashion. From family way of life to the latest children leisure activities, all the new spheres will be explored.“Kidding” is born…surfing on today’s wave…and it’s Milk’s raison d’être.

Parents automatically instill their own aesthetic values, class-biases, and fashion sense upon their children, but MilK provides greater source material for the successful transmission of the parental taste culture. The French MilK, however, seems to approach the “aesthete” in the classic anti-nouveau riche disposition where “taste” (a rare and natural gift from the gods) trumps vulgar demands for brand labels and conspicuous luxury. The latest issue’s featured stories are freak-folkers CocoRosie, American director Sofia Coppola, environmentalism, and traveling to Cancun, Barcelona, Palm Springs, and La Landelle.

The Japanese version’s cover, on the other hand, seems to advocate a totally different kind of aesthetic lifestyle for children:

  • (The world has been eagerly awaiting) the debut of the Louis Vuitton kids Line
  • 100 kids chairs
  • An essay from supermodel Helena Christensen
  • Cool “adult” T-shirts for your kids
  • A silver egg has been born from Hermès.

No real surprise here, but MilK Japon pretty much reads like every other catalog-esque, advertorial-filled consumer guide in Japan. The editors seem to retain a certain portion of the less-boldly consumerist aspects of the French sister publication, but product information dominates the cover and reveals the central appeal to target readers.

Even though I grew up in relatively non-urban college towns across the lower-portion of the United States, I am not going to claim that there was some kind of “pure” classless youth fashion code that we can look back on fondly as an age of innocence. I regularly wore Polo shirts without the slightest consideration that this had an impact on my placement within the schoolyard social structure. MilK’s introduction of class and taste into the experience of childhood is not especially new, but is a sharp escalation of pre-existing behavior. Instead of pretending like we don’t outfit our kids in our own favorite brands and labels, MilK just clarifies the process so that producers and consumers can find themselves more easily.

Socioeconomic class was intentionally hidden in the post-War period, but this idea that taste-based distinction should begin in early childhood will make class much more obvious for a new generation of Japanese. Hopefully, however, the kids in LV and Hermès won’t have to go to school with the riff-raff whose parents don’t read MilK. Those dirty Pigpens wouldn’t appreciate their peers’ clothing nor understand the amazing capital accumulation of their parents anyway.

Most of the time, a majority of people on Omotesando road in the middle of the day are not shoppers but photographers, ready to pounce on the next stylish girl with pink hair coming out of Wendy’s with an S-sized frosty. Somebody, however, has to supply the massive amounts of street snaps in Japan’s monthly fashion magazines. (PingMag has an interview with some of these photographers here.)

At first look, these impromptu style portraits seem to function as a way for editors to capture “what’s happening on the the streets” and pass it along to their readers. Youngsters can then compare their own style against the “standard” implied in the pictures or nick ideas for their own wardrobes from the most stylish.

The reality behind this media phenomenon, however, is not so clear-cut. I recently interviewed the managing editor at one of Japan’s longest-running and most prestigious male fashion magazines. The magazine ran a special feature on “snaps” for their May issue, and I asked him how they went about procuring the large number of images.

First, they ran an announcement in the back of the previous issue about where and when the street fashion shoots would be held in each of Japan’s major cities. This brought the magazine’s core readers out to the photographers, reducing the production team’s reliance on passers-by. Once shots came back to the editors, they selected photos based on the subject’s skill in appropriating and using the styles advocated in the magazine. By choosing specific styles from a pre-selected group, the editors were able to strengthen the validity of their own fashion message by demonstrating the prevalence of the magazine’s signature style out on “the streets” through this overwhelming and implicitly-objective photographic evidence.

I asked, are these fashion shots helpful to editors for discovering the next trends? In other words, do street snaps also function as a source of inspiration for fashion editors? No, it’s the opposite. Streets snaps allow editors to check to make sure that their wardrobe recipes end up being used by their target groups. For example, the magazine in question had been advocating wearing neckties with short-sleeve polo shirts for a year but had yet to see this combination out on the town. In the May street shots, however, kids had clearly adopted the style, and these photos helped ease fears in the editorial office that their message had not be in vain.

Obviously, a magazine like FRUiTS is a different animal — more interested in the artistry of fashion than facilitating the sales and consumption of it. (Last time I checked, FRUiTS did not offer brand names and prices next to the outfits like CUTiE.) Therefore, there is no real commercial agenda to guide the photographers and editors of FRUiTS into crafting photos towards a singular narrative. We should also understand that FRUiTS is not used in the same way as other fashion magazines. It is simply a collection of photos rather than a prescriptive magazine where readers demand a gentle voice of authority.

If editors from the mainstream fashion titles are selecting individual street shots with the intention of proving the widespread usage of their own advocated style, where does the bottom-up flow of tastes come into play in this process? Bottom-up implies that the elite and powerful will adopt and champion ideas from their “inferiors” and customers, but a majority of Japanese magazine editors do not go through the street snap production process with much room for inserting opinions, styles, and concepts that they do not already approve. At best, editors are using the photos to gauge the efficacy of their own message with reader tastes, but this involves consumers/readers saying “yes” or “no” to top-down styles rather than creating their own complex message and sending it up the food chain.

I do not mean to deny the existence of bottom-up taste flows in Japan — for example, the brands comprising the Tokyo Girls Collection are mostly designed by young women the same age as the consumers. But with the street snaps in the most widely-read fashion magazines, I find it hard to pronounce an equality of top-down and bottom-up flows once the real mechanics of the process have been illuminated.

There comes a time in every young boy’s life — at least in the Southern United States — where a blue blazer and khaki slacks no longer cut it at semi-formal functions. Around sixteen or seventen, the pants and the jacket need to originate from a single bolt of cloth. Accordingly, I inherited a number of suits from my equally tall uncle, an excellent golfer, and subsequently, a fan of the low two-button jacket.

I was grateful to receive such nice clothes and made use of them through college, but visiting Tokyo and then chaperoning a group of Japanese senmongakusei in New York, I couldn’t help but notice that there was something notably sharp and keen about the standard Japanese suit. Was it the color? The slender cut? Knowing very little about suits, I had neglected to notice that the standard Japanese model had three-buttons, starting very high on the chest. Of course, high three-button suits began to explode in the United States again shortly after my discovery — somewhat spurred by fashion industry plot, somewhat spurred by natural aesthetic reactions to our fathers’ two-button monsters. Now in 2006, the Brooks Brothers Three-Button has become a frat-boy staple, and while the three-button still dominates in Japan, the suits still tend to be slimmer and sharper, with tight high-water pants and well-formed shoulders. Americans may have caught up but our diverse body types and expanding girth watered down the classic look.

“Correct” (left) and “Incorrect” (right)

But there is an interesting quirk in the Japanese culture of the three-button suit. Despite the traditionally high levels of grooming in the mass culture, there are still a large number of Japanese men who button the bottom button of their suit jacket. As authoritarian style gurus at GQ will tell you, the first and second rules of Suit Club are that you do not button the final button. Of course, there is no practical, rational reason for this. According to “Andy”, the fashion rule comes to us from a fat royal who could not manage to fasten the jacket over his stomach. From such humble beginnings, we now have a rigid rule — a Western orthopraxy — regarding semi-formal style.

Whether we like it or not, all meaningful fashion trends require a certain slavery to form, not content. Our subcultural heroes — the Mods, the Teds, the Rude Boys, the Hippies — had a strict uniform. If they had taken a Protestant attitude towards faith and devotion to the calling, everyone would have gone off in individual directions, tearing the social fabric that bound them together in visual harmony. Japanese street fashion has been equally succesful in its dedication to form over content: obeying the rules and dedicating time to the details lead a remarkable level of fashion extremism.

Faithful readers of Brutus should all know very well that the last button is not buttoned — anything otherwise would be uncouth. But there may be a natural Japanese resistance against the open final button, for young men are required to button all buttons of their school uniforms — the Prussian gakuran — in strict military style. On one hand you have the “correct” Western fashion rules that advocate an irrational open button, and on the other hand, you have the ingrained Japanese tradition towards a full-buttoned suit jacket. Confucian propriety would perhaps find something grating about intentionally leaving one “t” uncrossed.

Depending on your involvement in this small skirmish, one of these positions is right and the other one is wrong. I do not think the third-button buttoners are acting in response to the Western rule: they are just ignorant of the convention. No doubt there are Westerners who make the same mistake, but in Japan, there is a more solid philosophical justification towards the total buttoning. Japanese fashion magazines will never openly advocate the closed third button, but their decline in readership may launch a newer environment of social distinction — where the button symbolizes not only some archaic cultural regulation, but respective association with an old or new order.