By Anna
They say that you can track the stock market by watching hemlines go up and down, but in Tokyo what you have to watch are the earrings. If you walk the back streets of Shibuya and Harajuku and troll the second-tier department stores in Shinjuku and Ginza, you'll see something familiar, at least if you're over 30: the 80s are back. Yes, they always SAY they're coming back, but this time I saw the shoulder pads and the hoop earrings to prove it.
It's kind of a relief, actually, to see such glorious, tacky, flashy, and outrageously bad taste. We've been subdued and ladylike and restrained for years now, and honestly, yawn. When everyone was doing well financially it was all about elegant restraint: small diamond studs, tennis bracelets. We had derivative iterations of cowboy fashion and hemp fashion, copper bangles and raffia, wooden beads and retro gold. For a while, the only people who wore status jewelry were trophy wives and gangsters.
It was almost as if people were embarrassed by their money in the boom times. The fashion world embraced big shapeless tent dresses that cost a fortune and tailored suits as sexy as Queen Elizabeth. There were empire waists to keep things sexless; there was primness and timidity and worship of the past. But now that we're all barreling toward uncertainty, everyone's breaking out their favorite cheap tricks: ankle boots, zippers, miniskirts, and of course big purple star-shaped earrings. It's thrilling. We're all going to hell in a handbasket, so bring on the glitz!
Wide shoulders are back, balloon pants, cropped rolled jeans, big puffy socks: it's just like junior high school, with less hairspray. I spotted threads of punk, odes to Madonna, and some love for Michael Jackson. Watch out; the mullet may be next.
Entertaining as all this is, it's all about plastic: the kind in your wallet and the kind you loop through your ears. A willingness to bedeck one's self in plastic beads and trinkets speaks to a fabulously devil-may-care sensibility. These are not investment pieces. These are not the priceless logo bags and classic trench coats that the magazines swear we'll still be using in ten years. (We all know that they lie.) No, these are clothes that have the shelf life of a cheesecake. You'll wear them for a few months and then they'll be mortifyingly dated. Heck, in Urahara hipster territory they'd be dated in a week, but us mortals have a little more leeway.
In junior high school, I had some teal-colored plastic butterfly earrings and my best friend had purple monkeys. We bought them together in Harajuku. Last week on the same little street I looked into a shop window and I saw that butterflies, those symbols of transformation, were back on the rack. It might be time to pick up another pair.
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