No. 5 (2025)
Essays

Lolitas, Mountain Witches and Sexy Gals: Japanese fashion as rebellious style from the Lost Decades to now

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  • Hui-Ying Kerr
Hui-Ying Kerr
Nottingham Trent University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/fh-3531

Published 30-06-2025

Keywords

  • Japan,
  • Streetstyle,
  • Lost Decades,
  • Gyaru,
  • Lolita

How to Cite

Kerr, H.-Y. (2025). Lolitas, Mountain Witches and Sexy Gals: Japanese fashion as rebellious style from the Lost Decades to now. Fashion Highlight, (5), 102–111. https://doi.org/10.36253/fh-3531

Copyright (c) 2025 Hui-Ying Kerr

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Coinciding with the global economic stagnation of the 2010s has been a rise in the adoption of Japanese youth fashions of the 1990s and 2000s, called the Lost Decades. A time of prolonged economic stagnation in Japan, these street-fashion subcultures became known for their vibrancy and originality in resisting wider narratives of high youth unemployment and being labelled the Lost Generation. This paper explores the street-fashions of gyaru and Lolita, as proponents of a rebellious Japanese youth fashioning heterotopias of their own making, challenging prevailing narratives of femininity through social deviance, soft rebellion, and mortality. Comparing them to UK gyaru and Lolita communities, it explores how these styles are evolving to answer different subcultural needs outside Japan, which has been little studied. However, while capturing imaginations of youth globally, they bring into question as new knowledge the meaning of Japan to a new disenfranchised youth and the ethics of adopting subcultural dress from other cultures. Locating it within the specific cultural and historic environment of the Lost Decades, often understudied in relation to these subjects, this paper emphasises the need to reposition these fashion subcultures against the specific conditions within which they are practiced to better understand their underlying implications.

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