Tokyo street style walks to the beat of its own drum, possessing a singular identity that’s unswayed by current fashion trends in other parts of the world.
Generally speaking, street fashion in Japan got its start a couple of years after the 1968 student movement, in which young people in Japan and elsewhere were actively opposing the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons, among other things. Young Japanese people “renounced the values of earlier generations and took a confrontational stance towards them,” according to a report by Google Arts and Culture.
It’s all quite punk if you think about it, as street fashion has long been associated with rebellion and a do-what-you-want attitude. Even Japan’s biggest designers ― Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto among them ― have created garments that opposed popular trends and created new ones.
To this day, Japanese style ― particularly in cities like Tokyo, which hosted its most recent fashion week in March ― is on its own level. Oversized, boxy silhouettes are hallmarks of Japanese fashion, but in recent years, it appears that anything goes. Even when fashionable folks in Tokyo wear popular trends, like skirts-over-pants or puffy sleeves, they do so in their own way.
Below, get your daily dose of fashion inspiration from some of the coolest street style to come out of Tokyo so far this year, as seen on people at the city’s fashion week: