(Feb. 11, 2011)

Print is so passe: In a world once ruled by magazine mavens, bloggers now reigning rulers of fashion

Lisa Gomi / Yomiuri Shimbun Washington Bureau

Ten years ago, if you were sitting in the front row at New York Fashion Week show, chances are you were an editor who had spent decades earning your cushy seat and unobstructed view. At New York Fashion Week this February, however, editors found themselves sharing the row with bloggers whose claims to fame were their photos, URL and wit. Fashion bloggers even had a whole conference devoted to their craft, with a keynote speech by Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of the luxury label Proenza Schouler.

The grand entrance of bloggers into the fashion world suggests the decline of their print counterparts. Sasha Wilkins, who was Executive Style Editor for The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ before turning full time to her blog LibertyLondonGirl, recounted that magazines “were the gatekeepers” to the industry and that everything “was controlled by print publication.” Now, bloggers are threatening to usurp print’s throne.

But a closer look suggests that fashion blogs and traditional media enjoy a symbiotic relationship. Wilkins credits the success of her luxury brand consulting firm, Liberty Media, to her understanding of both new and old media. She acknowledges that her blog is popular partly because she offers “an insider view,” like her recent coverage of Chanel’s haute couture show in Paris.

Readers flock to her blog because it opens up the infamously exclusive fashion industry, and in some ways the appeal of her approach depends on the industry’s continuing inaccessibility.

The success of Scott Schuman’s wildly popular photo blog The Sartorialist is also dependent on cooperation with the industry. Editors and other industry heavyweights felt confident hiring Schuman after they saw him at shows using his low-tech approach–no assistants, no lights, no hair and makeup–and the resulting photos on his blog. They liked what they saw, and Schuman has since done a weekly page for GQ and major ad campaigns such as Burberry’s Art of the Trench project. Offline, he has published a book, and just exhibited his work at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.

But, Schuman says these high profile opportunities are a means to an end.

“I worked with those people to get enough money to be able to go back to my blog,” he explained. Though the blog remains top priority, he still depends on the industry and traditional media for both finances and content.

Japanese fashion bloggers remain noticeably absent from the international scene. According to Signature9 and Stylite, two Web sites that rank popular fashion blogs based on unique visitors, Google searches, and other criteria, top blogs remain concentrated in the West. Wilkins and Schuman both have Japanese readers, but they acknowledge obstacles to further expansion in Japan.

“I’m afraid my kanji is no good, I have no Japanese,” Wilkins confessed. Schuman admitted to fashion culture shock during his first trip to Japan with ganguro girls and their uniform of fake tans, bleached hair, and revealing clothing.

“It’s just so weird. I actually don’t even know how to relate to it,” he said, adding “I’ve got to go back and start peeling away the layers…to understand it better.”

Loic Bizel understands the sentiment. In 2001, Bizel started LeBiz Consulting to educate foreign brands on Japan’s market after working in the Japanese fashion industry for five years.

“Japanese fashion is more diverse as Japanese people are not scared of mixing styles, brands, and trends,” he explained. With such enthusiasm for fashion, it may only be a matter of time before a Japanese name joins the ranks of bloggers such as Wilkins and Schuman.

Tokyo Fashion Shops : when clients create their virtual favorite shop ?

J.Front Retailing Co., which operates the Daimaru and Matsuzakaya department stores, plans to offer a free simulation game for cellular phones as a way to attract younger shoppers to its stores.

Department stores in Japan mainly attract the over-40 crowd, with younger shoppers choosing instead to frequent clothing stores and other specialty shops.Starting from Wednesday, the social networking site operated by mixi Inc. will offer free downloads of a simulation game that lets players create and operate their own ideal department store. As the game proceeds and the store racks up more sales, the player receives 500-yen coupons that can be redeemed at the actual Daimaru Tokyo department store.

J.Front Retailing hopes that the free game will encourage shoppers in their 20s and 30s to visit its department stores.

Our Tokyo Fashion Tour clients might enjoy this new idea !

read the original article :

Paris, Milan, Tokyo. Tokyo?

By HIROKO TABUCHI

Published: January 1, 2010

TOKYO — Japan’s trailblazers of street fashion are the envy of Western designers, spawning Web sites filled with snapshots of Tokyo youngsters in the latest distressed jeans or psychedelic stockings.

With city sidewalks as their catwalks, young Japanese flaunt carefully layered tops and thigh-high boots sporting labels like Galaxxxy, Phenomenon and Function Junction.

But most of Tokyo’s clothing designers have not figured out how to cash in on the city’s fashion sense. Only a handful of Japanese brands, like A Bathing Ape or Evisu Jeans, have gained traction beyond the nation’s shores. Chic local labels like Fur Fur and Garcia Marquez Gauche remain mostly unknown outside Japan.

Experts say that the nation’s fashion industry is too fragmented and too focused on the domestic market to make it overseas.

“For much of this decade, fashion trends have started in Japan and gone global. But Japanese brands don’t even realize that,” said Loic Bizel, a French-born fashion consultant based in Tokyo. Japan “generates trends and ideas, but it stops there,” he said. “Many brands are not even interested in going overseas.”

So each season, Mr. Bizel takes fashion industry buyers from America and Europe — mass clothiers like Hennes & Mauritz of Sweden and Topshop of Britain — to buy up bagfuls of the latest hits. The designs are then whisked overseas to be reworked, resized, stitched together and sold under Western labels.

In that business model, there is little financial gain for Japan. In 2008, Japan’s clothing and apparel-related exports came to a mere $416 million, dwarfed by the $3.68 billion exported by American apparel companies, and a tiny fraction of China’s $113 billion.

Meanwhile, Japan’s domestic apparel industry is on the decline. It shrank 1.3 percent, to 4.37 trillion yen ($48 billion), in 2008, and is expected to post a steeper decline for 2009 as recession-weary consumers and an aging population cut back sharply on spending.

“Japanese fashion might be considered cutting-edge, but overseas markets have been largely elusive,” said Atsushi Izu, an analyst at the Nomura Research Institute in Tokyo. “Japan’s fashion industry is very fragmented, and most companies lack the resources and know-how to bring their brands to foreign markets.”

The government is trying to help. Earlier this year, the Foreign Ministry dispatched a group of suit-clad officials to Tokyo’s hip Harajuku neighborhood to survey the latest trends, part of an effort to promote Japanese fashion overseas. After interviews with shoppers and sales clerks, the ministry came up with a battle plan: to appoint three young trendsetters as “ambassadors” of Japanese chic, charged with extending the industry’s reach overseas and piquing interest in Japanese brands.

One ambassador, Misako Aoki — a model known in Tokyo for her Lolita look of frilly Rococo-inspired dresses paired with platform shoes — has been dispatched to France, Spain, Russia and Brazil, where she has attended expos and hosted fashion talk shows in her trademark floppy bow tie and frilly smock.

“I hope that Lolita fashion and Japanese fashion in general will raise your interest in Japan,” Ms. Aoki said in São Paulo, Brazil, in November after starring in a Lolita fashion show organized by the Japanese embassy. (Although Lolita style is a reference to theVladimir Nabokov novel “Lolita,” its look is more covered-up Victorian schoolgirl than skin-baring teenage vixen.)

The trade ministry has also helped revamp the twice-yearly Tokyo Collection and started inviting foreign journalists to come on the government’s dime. For the first time this year, the collection, renamed Japan Fashion Week, sponsored a splinter fashion event in New York to showcase Japanese designers, and it has planned another runway show in New York in mid-February.

“Japanese fashion has so much global potential,” says Kenjiro Monji, director general of the Foreign Ministry’s Public Diplomacy Department, who oversees Japan’s cultural push overseas.

But the government’s efforts have won it few fans in the fashion industry. Besides Ms. Aoki, the two other fashion ambassadors chosen by the government are a woman who likes to dress up in cute high school uniforms and another who mixes and matches secondhand clothes. Promoting such niche tastes does little to help the wider fashion industry, many say.

And Japan Fashion Week remains a relative nonevent filled with relatively obscure designers like Motonari Ono and Kazuhiro Takakura. Ambitious young designers hoping to follow in the footsteps of Japanese greats like Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo may have to do what they did: pass over Tokyo’s shows for those in Paris.

Meanwhile, local favorites like Fur Fur — a new brand that mixes airy cotton frocks with distressed trench coats — have neither the expertise nor the resources to market overseas. Despite rave reviews from industry insiders, it has only one small store in Tokyo.

“Of course, taking my brand overseas is a dream,” said Fur Fur’s designer, Aya Furuhashi. “But to be honest, that’s really beyond us right now.”

What Japan’s fashion industry needs is more concrete help in marketing and setting up shop overseas, experts say. The government could also play a larger role helping Japanese labels protect their intellectual property rights, they say.

There are some promising signs. With government support, the start-up Xavel, which runs fashion shows that let women order outfits in real time using their cellphones, has opened shows in Paris and Beijing.

Fast Retailing, which sells the Uniqlo brand, has also been flexing its muscles overseas. Uniqlo, Japan’s answer to Gap, has roots in suburban outlets and does not have the level of respect among young fashion fans that many of Japan’s hipper brands do. But with ample funds and aggressive pricing on its fleece jackets and shirts, Uniqlo has expanded, with 92 stores worldwide.

Tadashi Yanai, chief executive of Fast Retailing, has said he hopes to build it into the world’s biggest apparel company, with sales of 5 trillion yen in 2020.

“We are part of a global economy,” Mr. Yanai said at a recent forum. “We cannot look inward.”

Moshe Komata contributed to this report.