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CONOMI
Diplomatically cute
IN 2008, the Japanese Foreign Ministry selected three women to be Ambassadors of Cute (Kawaii Taishi), including seifuku-wearing actress Shizuka Fujioka, who was nineteen. The Ministry hoped to capitalize on the popularity of cute Japanese things abroad and Fujioka saw her selection as a huge honor. “I think they picked me because I look good in a uniform.”
MOON THE CHILD
Fujioka had already graduated from high school, where she was disappointed by her school’s homely uniform. She now owns five sets of store-bought seifuku for her role, preferring the blazer and plaid skirt look, because, she says, “Sailor suits are way hard to coordinate!” She borrows the rest of her wardrobe from online retailer CONOMi, where she moonlights as an uniform adviser. “If you think school uniforms are cute,” she says, “you shouldn’t hesitate to wear them—even if you’ve already graduated from school!”
Her ambassadorial post ended in 2009, after a year of smiling and speaking at cultural events such as the Japan Expo 08 in Paris. According to Fujioka her role was to show the whole world “how cute Japanese school uniforms are.” Mission accomplished.
For girls in their mid-teens the uniform symbolizes a brief period in their life when they are free, unbound by adult matters like career, marriage, and children. There’s schoolwork, sure, but as teenagers they are cushioned from the world around them. They’re not children, and they’re not quite adults—yet they have more freedom than both. Anything is possible. So many girls yearn to wear uniforms even when their schools don’t require them. And if some girls think their own school’s outfit is dorky, they change into clothes that, to the untrained eye, look exactly like school uniforms. Whether it’s during school hours or after class and weekends, the uniform is a blossoming beacon, bluntly signaling to society: I am a schoolgirl, young and free.
CONOMI
This demand has led some boutiques to hock cute, unofficial uniforms under the guise of “fashion” in order to sidestep any run-ins with schools. Online retailer CONOMi, for example, specializes in coordinating schoolgirl looks yet says it doesn’t sell school-approved uniforms, but rather, “preppy-inspired fashion.” These faux uniforms are called nanchatte seifuku (just kidding uniforms). In 2008, CONOMi opened a store in the schoolgirl shopping paradise of Harajuku and launched an in-house clothing brand, arCONOMi, the following year. Some customers even show up in full school regalia to get advice on the fine art of matching bows, vests, and plaid skirts or what necktie goes with their school-issued blazer. “My school’s uniform was not so cute,” says a twenty-one-year-old CONOMi staffer in full uniform get up, “and I always ached to wear fashionable school clothes.”
Back in the Tombow museum, Sano is sitting at the table in the large meeting room, surrounded on all sides by mannequins in school clothes. When asked if he thinks uniforms will vanish, his reply is frank. “Not in Japan. Uniforms will always make the schoolgirl aware of what she is and her academic purpose. Japanese people take great pride in their roles in society. So, policemen should look like policemen. Nurses should look like nurses. And schoolgirls should look like schoolgirls.”
Japan’s coolest skirts
ACCORDING TO URBAN LEGEND, the shortest school skirts in Japan are found in bitterly cold Niigata Prefecture, located off the Sea of Japan. While skirts started to inch down in Tokyo at the turn of the millennium, Niigata girls kept hiking them up until they hovered around eight inches (20 cm)above the knee, compared to Tokyo’s six-inch (15 cm) average. These girls think nothing of walking through the snow with their bare thighs covered in goose bumps. The Niigata girls even accentuate their limbs by wearing short socks that show more leg.
While schoolgirls think the micro-minis are cute, the Niigata PTA doesn’t, and they kicked off a “Proper Dress” campaign in 2009. Posters dotted Niigata school halls, telling schoolgirls that shortening their outfits was prohibited, and the PTA also distributed long-skirt propaganda that implied getting good grades and wearing tasteful uniforms were somehow connected.
Manufacturers like Tombow have even devised ways to keep schoolgirls from rolling up their skirts: such as waist bands so thick they’re impossible to fold or when rolled reveal the school’s unflattering crest. In Hokkaido, Sapporo’s Municipal Minamigaoka Junior High School went as far as replacing skirts with slacks, which quickly stopped any short skirt problems. Stopped, we should say, until some girl rebel decides to take scissors to them.
Ironically the best defense against short skirts may prove to be cyclical fashion trends. In early 2009, the Japanese media noticed that girls in idyllic Nara, the country’s ancient capital, were wearing 1980s-style long skirts and were even calling short skirts “dorky.”
NIIGATA COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN
Get loose
THE MOST NOTORIOUS ITEM in the Japanese schoolgirl wardrobe would have to be loose socks. In the mid-1990s the kogal look was defined by them and they have come to symbolize a certain type of schoolgirl—one that is sexy, rebellious, and very cool. But originally, these infamous socks were American.
Eric Smith, an attorney by trade, hails from three generations of sock makers. In 1982 he started his own company, E.G. Smith, after adapting a woollen hunting sock design from his father’s company. Eric changed the material to cotton, and managed to capitalize on the 1980s Flashdance fitness craze. By the early 1990s, the New York–based Smith was looking to expand and struck a Japanese distribution deal with a textile company in Osaka called WIX.
Various stories exist to explain how the socks then became popular with Japanese schoolgirls, including one that has schoolgirls in frosty Miyagi Prefecture choosing them purely to keep warm. But Smith and WIX company president Takahiro Uehori have another story. “Originally, we launched an E.G. Smith display at a SOGO department store in Yokohama in 1993,” says Uehori. “Two high school girls bought the white boot socks and wore them to class. Before you knew it, the look had caught on at their school.” Rigid school dress codes called for white socks, and Smith’s socks were the antithesis of regulation tighty-whities. The boot socks—later dubbed “loose socks” for the way they hung—flattered short schoolgirl legs, making them appear long and slender. A fashion reporter noticed the Yokohama fad, penned a tiny blurb on the twelve-inch (30 cm) socks, and the trend spread across the country like a bad case of mono. “Loose socks weren’t your typical short-lived teen trend,” says Smith, “this one lasted ten years.” Each generation wants something to call its own, and for girls during the 1990s, loose socks were it. “The self-expression became a uniform in itself,” says Smith. “It expressed an entire generation of women.”
ERIC SMITH
Schoolgirls may have loved them, but schools didn’t. “When loose socks first caught on,” Smith says, “schools banned girls from wearing them. Which only fueled their proliferation.” Suddenly the socks weren’t just a fashion statement, they were a national obsession. “On trips to Tokyo, I’d visit Shibuya Station at three in the afternoon,” Smith says. “Schoolgirls would be changing out of school-regulation knee-high
