Decolonizing Luxury Fashion in Japan

Abstract

Japan went from consuming more foreign luxury fashion brands than the rest of the world combined in the late 1980s to a complete rethinking of both the concept and practice of luxury after the bursting of its economic bubble. One key sensibility that arose was that of surōraifu, a Japanese word after the English “slow life.” This esthetic, expressing the slowing down of time, was part of rising cultural nationalism but also represented a delinking of Japanese fashion from modernity/coloniality’s horizon of expectations which positioned Europe as the font of desirable luxury consumption and European luxury fashion as a central symbol of civilization. This paper argues that in consumer culture Japan’s modernity was colonial in defining the most valuable things as the goods from a foreign culture and that perspective changing crises are able to question the values and change the tastes of consumers in line with a decolonial delinking.

Keywords:

• decoloniality
• fashion
• Japan
• luxury
• surōraifu
• slow-life

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Many of these ideas were developed with my graduate student, Christine Wu, whose thesis, “Blue Hands Blue Hearts: Meaning Making at a Japanese Indigo Textiles Workshop,” submitted in 2017, explored this post-luxury, slow life desire anthropologically via participant observation of authentic-experience seeking tourism in Japan. Wealthy enough to stay in luxury hotels, see landmarks, shop, and dine in luxury restaurants, these tourists instead stayed in a Spartan and remote indigo workshop and worked making fabric as their means of experiencing Japan.

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Notes on contributors

Toby Slade

Toby Slade is an Associate Professor at the University of Technology Sydney and an authority on Japanese fashion and popular culture. He lived and worked for 16 years in Japan and is author of Japanese Fashion: A Culture History (Berg, 2009) and Introducing Japanese Popular Culture (Routledge, 2018). He is a founding member of the Research Collective for Decolonizing Fashion. [email protected]