FRUiTS, the rise and fall of the iconic harajuku streetstyle magazine — a thread

In 1997, Japanese photographer Shoichi Aoki started a little magazine called FRUiTS where he documented the boom of harajuku’s fashion subcultures (lolita, decora, cyberpunk, goth and every impossible in between) and their unique outfits and style

the magazine was designed to show the optimism and individualism of the young people in Harajuku. Aoki wanted to counteract the fashion magazines that present packaged styles and designers and giving the freedom of expression back to the individual.

In the 1980s, Japanese avant-gardeists like Kawakubo and Yamamoto redefined the way we think about fashion. However, the harajuku fashion movement was a counter-movement to the designer boom — the bold and bright Harajuku style was a sort of chemical reaction to Rei’s “crows”

FRUiTS helped lead western interest in Japanese fashion as some of its photographs became first popular in the fashion community, and then the western started refererring to the harajuku style as “FRUiTS fashion”

However, after 20 years and 233 issues, as the harajuku boys and girls started vanishing from the scene, Aoki announced in February 2017 “there are no more cool kids to photograph” and that FRUiTS magazine would cease publication effective immediately.

Aoki once said “the harajuku fashion comes in waves” and lucky for us, the cool kids are starting to resurface in the tokyo scene once again: the magazine founder said that contemporary streetwear designers like Demna Gvasalia have breathed new life into the streets of Harajuku.

In consecuence, Aoki said he has decided to focus on a FRUiTS magazine relaunch this year. “But today’s fashion media is quite different. Its no longer enough to publish a print magazine in the digital age” he says; ”Instagram is important, but it isn’t enough to tell the story”

At the moment, Shoichi is working on digitizing the entire FRUiTS archive which is about 20,000 images and 20 years of work — you can find the digitized looks in IG @/fruits_magazine_archives and the first 50 issues of FRUiTS here http://archive.org/details/fruits …