Fashion Snoops

Growing up, summer holiday visits to my aunties in suburban London meant that while I lacked the tan that most of my classmates had picked up at the beach I always had the best back to school outfits. My favorite was Selfridges on Oxford Street, but even the local Bentall’s Center held wonders like TopShop and H&M. Now that I live in Tokyo, trips to London don’t have the same big city appeal, but I was hoping that my visit this summer would result in a few good finds.

The designer scene is pretty exciting in London at the moment, but I have an unwavering affinity for the street and was looking forward to seeing the latest crop of trendy boutiques, the ubiquitous high street ones, and how people are putting everything together. Especially since Tokyo and London are the cities with the reputation for cutting-edge street wear! And London girls are so cool, with their bangs, sneakers, play with color, and vintage pieces mixed with trendy ones, that I was hoping a little of it would rub off.

Having a unique look, both on an individual level and a city-wide level is pretty challenging these days, considering that the shops are the same in all the major cities. Tokyo now has a TopShop in LaForet and an H&M is set to open this Fall, and London has Uniqlo and Muji. Not that this matters much, since thanks to trend reporters like us Snoops, even the clothes are the same: dip-dyed skirts, star patterns, lots of yellow… I could go on. The stuff on the high street was a mirror of the stuff in Shibuya. Even Camden Market, with the gothic and punk shops had a ring of Takeshita Dori to it.

Do you know where you are? This shop could be anywhere.

Uniqlo, now a global brand, in suburban London.

More and more, I felt, it is about who your fashion idols are, how you shop and how your wear it, as opposed to what you can get your hands on. Because of the bazaar set-up (a hundred little shops in one big one) in shops like Tokyo’s Shibuya 109 there are an awful lot of mannequins and shop girls to influence your shopping. These Tokyo shop girls are notorious fashion plates, who live and breathe fashion and are keen to advise customers. I don’t think I have ever managed to hold something up to the mirror without a shop girl coming over to tell me it looked cute, or make a suggestion. At TopShop they just looked bored, leaving the customers to argue over the last size 8 dress on the rack and make their own decisions.

On the other hand, compare the impeccably styled but relatively bland and innocuous Koda Kumi, a commercially produced Japanese fashion idol to someone like, say, Peaches Geldof. The fact that bad girls have such a widespread, mainstream appeal in London says heaps about the kind of fashion and freewheeling lifestyle images are attractive there.

Koda Kumi versus Peaches Geldof.

Londoners seemed too smart for the hippie duds that, marketed alongside the booming eco trend, Tokyoites scooped up en masse, although the former fell hook line and sinker for the 80s revival. I also spotted a surprising number of girls wearing puffed out or bubble skirted mini-dresses in what seemed to be taffeta, at a night club that had an art-student bent to it. I thought they were vintage, but I also saw racks of replicas at the market in Camden and a local friend later explained that he thought Victoria Beckham had worn something like that recently.

Vintage is big on hipster Brick Lane.

As I continued my search for the great summer holiday find, I eventually uncovered a vintage dress with a v-neck and puff sleeves, bedecked with black sequins, at an Oxfam thrift store around the corner from the Bentalls Center. It was just similar and different enough to the vintage dresses I’d seen at the nightclub to appeal to me, and I look forward to psyching myself up to actually wear it in a completely different context.