Fashionsnoops Fashion Blog

From my experience browsing the magazine racks of bookstores in major cities worldwide, Tokyo seems to have the most extensive selection of titles on offer. There really is a magazine for everyone, whether you are devoted to vintage Levi’s and aloha shirts or Korean soap opera stars. In a chicken or the egg kind of scenario, it is hard to say whether people define themselves by the magazines they read or whether the magazines define them.

When it comes to girls’ and women’s fashion, dozens of magazines with obvious names such as Glamour, Sweet, and Grace and more obscure ones like Spur, Blenda, and Crea tempt readers to join their tribe. Assumptions abound: girls who read hipster Fudge shop in Daikanayama, girls who read Cutie prefer the back streets shops of Harajuku and are probably art students or studying to become hair dressers, girls who read trendy Vivi shop and party in Shibuya, and girls who read Egg are responsible for some of the wackier street fashion movements over the last decade (like the super-tan Gangaru) and are considered by the government to be a public menace.

The word “girl” or “gyaru” in Japanese should not be misinterpreted to mean someone who has yet to reach their teens; instead, the title applies to any young woman (and yes, pushing 30 counts) devoted to a fun, carefree, single (as in not yet married) city life.

So when the new Ryuukou Tsuushin Girl magazine debuted this season, I wondered, who and what is a Ryouukou Girl? Ryuukou Tsuushin, which is Japanese for fashion communication, is also the name of a popular domestic “high-fashion” magazine and Girl’s namesake. Domestic magazines differ from franchise imports (like Vogue Nippon, L’Official Japon, etc) in that they actually have regular coverage of Japanese designers along with international ones. Ryuukou Girl is similar, with fashion spreads of the foreign brands favored by Tokyo’s young fashionable moneyed crowd, like See by Chloé, McQ Alexander McQueen, and Blugirl, plus local ones, like the sexed-up urban Sly label sold at mass market locations like Shibuya 109 and Marui Department Store.

What makes Ryuukou Girl stand out from other girl-oriented magazines is that it's a heavyweight seasonal glossy consisting mostly of highly stylized artistic photo spreads, all of them composed by the well-known it-girl photographer Mika Ninagawa. Whether or not this is Ninagawa’s baby or she is just along for the ride, the lush, brightly colored and super girly (think flowers, hearts, balloons and strawberries) images are definitely hers. The scant text, with the exception of the front of the book editor’s picks and reviews, are hers as well, including a text-heavy essay on how to be a femme fatale and interviews with other stylists.

Who cares what stylists, photographers and other behind the scene figures have to say? The traditional answer would be people who work in the fashion industry and the debut of Ryuukou Girl could be just one more indicator of the massive entity that the girls’ fashion industry has become. It also seems to want to make a statement that there is a market for girls’ high fashion, which would be an interesting trend to monitor.

Ryuukou Girl is an Infas Publication along with other fashion industry-minded titles like FN (a high fashion glossy that covers the international runways) and WWD Japan. Infas has definitely been in hyperdrive over the past few months as I have noticed that the weekly tabloid form of WWD (as opposed to the seasonal book) is now displayed prominently not only on the magazine racks at major book stores but also at convenience stores and train station kiosks in fashionable neighborhoods like Omotesando.

I’ve noticed that other industry-minded publications and even collection catalogs (of the type that PR usually sends to editors) have also been increasingly visible on the racks lately. Surely there are a lot of people working in fashion in Tokyo, but the new idea seems to be that anyone who considers him or herself fashionable should keep up on the latest industry news as it were privy must-have insider information.