Overview
The Heisei decades made Tokyo a place other cities watched. Japanese street style became internationally legible in a way no national fashion had been before, and at the same time a domestic retailer reorganised what ordinary people wore — two opposite forces, one about invention and one about basics.
Key garments and style
The street styles were numerous and specific: the layered Ura-Harajuku look built on imported streetwear and small labels; gyaru and its ganguro extreme, with tanned skin and bleached hair; Lolita in its sweet and gothic forms, built from Victorian and Rococo references; decora, piled with plastic accessories. They were photographed and catalogued by street magazines, FRUiTS above all, which ran from 1997 and turned Harajuku into an archive.
The counterweight was Uniqlo. Its fleece campaign at the end of the 1990s sold jackets in tens of millions and financed an international expansion in the 2000s, and its plain, cheap, well-made basics — with GU and other chains behind it — became the default Japanese wardrobe.
Kimono wearing continued to contract into ceremony, sustained by rental shops for graduations and weddings and by a vintage trade that made antique kimono cheap and available.
Transition
The Reiwa era carries the same split forward, with sustainability and gender-neutral cuts entering the mainstream and street style dispersed onto social media.