FRUiTS of the loom

My friend Pammy, originator of the term "husbang" and all-round groover recently leant me a copy of a book about FRUiTS magazine, full of photos of Japanese street fashion lovingly catalogued by Shoichi Aoki.




I've seen some amazing pictures of crazy Japanese kids, (and plenty of the kids themselves when I lived in Sydney) but I didn't realise until reading the (very brief) little blurb in the book the tradition that they were participating in; the platforms, the hair clips, the lot.

The first novel in the world, Tales of Genji, was written by a Japanese woman called Murasaki Shikibu. A couple of years ago I read "Tales of Murasaki", a fictionalised diary of Murasaki by Liza Dalby, anthropologist and former geisha (which is a cracker of an answer to "so what do you do?") It is an enormously long novel, with hundreds of descriptions of individual outfits with seventeen layers of fabric representing the shades of purple on the Eastern face of Mt Fuji at the vernal equinox, or something of the kind.




At least they were more interesting than the endless fashion checklists in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. I mean I know it really mattered to the characters, and they were all vain, evil, and shallow as a puddle, but Christ it was hard to read. Bored, not horrified. I'd already got that point from his earlier novel, Less Than Zero, which at least I managed to finish.

My ex husband and I used to give nature names to each other's outfits every day - the glistening moss on the smooth riverstone for a green shirt and black duds, that kind of thing. In our defence we were in our early twenties and didn't have much to do at Uni. My husbang now would never dream of such poetic flights of adolescent whimsy. It's fortunate that he was blessed with extreme good looks, for his fashion choices are often poor. Luckily for me, he can fix shit, and has heaps of tools.