#1980s celebrity photos

[eroticlamb]

The Cramps backstage at the Electric Ballroom, Camden Town, London, March 21st, 1980 ♡ Photographed by Paul Slattery

[tyger-land]

ʟᴀᴅʏ ᴅɪᴀɴᴀ sᴘᴇɴᴄᴇʀ The future Princess Diana working as a nursery school assistant in London, September 1980. Arthur Edwards.

[soft-homestyle]

Sean Connery

-

Stay cozy.

@soft-homestyle

[rocketqueen1989x]

🎀 BEAUTIFUL BOY🎀

[merchantphoto]

our upscaled and enhanced photo of a young Matt Dillon, who played Dallas Winston in The Outsiders (1983)

[liefst]

some favourites from the magritte museum in brussels

[christianbalefanatic]

Christian Bale photographed in his hotel room promoting the release of Empire Of The Sun (February 20, 1988)

Re: Christian Bale as Jim Graham in Empire of the Sun (1987) dir. Steven Spielberg

(christianbalefanatic edit)

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

The lives of a gay couple who lived in a Dorset village for nearly six decades have been turned into an exhibition. Norman Notley (1890–1980) and David Brynley (1902–1981) moved to Corfe Castle in 1923 and lived openly as a couple, despite homosexuality being illegal at the time. The two men were successful musicians who sang together in Britain and the United States and they had many friends in the art world. Photographs and diaries on display at Dorset Museum reveal they lived peacefully with the local community for 57 years until their deaths.

In 1973, local people organised an event for the couple to celebrate their 50 years in the village. Museum director Claire Dixon said: "They were known as 'the boys' quite affectionately by the community. "They didn't throw the party, the community threw it for them. "When lots of people were having to hide the fact that they were gay, or think about their behaviour in public space, it seems that they were able to live quite a peaceful life in the village." The couple shared a passion for creating art as well as collecting and Notley bequeathed his collection of paintings to Dorset Museum. Despite being able to live authentically, the only image in the collection of them being affectionate to one another is a photo of Brynley kissing Notley on the cheek.

Notley died in 1980, aged 90, and Brynley a year later, aged 81. Maisie Ball, an archaeology student at Bournemouth University, began digitising the couple's photographs and transcribing their journals and letters as part of a work placement at the museum. She said: "Being able to share their story has been so important as there are not many collections like this that give a glimpse into the lives of LGBTQ+ people from this time period. "The photographs that have stuck with me the most are the ones with their many dogs and the rare few of Norman on his own, where you get to see a glimpse of his personality." The display, curated by Ms Ball, with advice from Prof Jana Funke of the University of Exeter, is on display throughout February to coincide with LGBT+ History Month. (Full article)

[coochiequeens]

I know this blog focuses on TIMs invading women’s sports and locker rooms but Saving Women’s Sports means more than that. Like calling out sexist bs when companies give men real clothes to compete in and women get basically underwear.

The Nike Air Innovation Summit in Paris on Thursday.Credit...Dominique Maitre/WWD, via Getty Images

By Vanessa Friedman April 12, 2024

Ever since the Norwegian women’s beach handball team turned the fact that they were required to wear teeny-tiny bikini bottoms for competition into a cause célèbre, a quiet revolution has been brewing throughout women’s sports. It’s one that questions received conventions about what female athletes do — or don’t — have to wear to perform at their very best.

It has touched women’s soccer (why white shorts?), gymnastics (why not a unitard rather than a leotard?), field hockey (why a low-cut tank top?) and many more, including running.

So it probably should not have come as a shock to Nike that when it offered a sneak peek of the Team U.S.A. track and field unies during a Nike Air event in Paris celebrating its Air technology on Thursday (which also included looks for other Olympic athletes, like Kenya’s track and field team, France’s basketball team and Korea’s break dancing delegation), they were met with some less-than-enthusiastic reactions.

See, the two uniforms Nike chose to single out on the mannequins included a men’s compression tank top and mid-thigh-length compression shorts and a woman’s bodysuit, cut notably high on the hip. It looked sort of like a sporty version of a 1980s workout leotard. As it was displayed, the bodysuit seemed as if it would demand some complicated intimate grooming.

Citius Mag, which focuses on running news, posted a photo of the uniforms on Instagram, and many of its followers were not amused.

“What man designed the woman’s cut?” wrote one.

“I hope U.S.A.T.F. is paying for the bikini waxes,” wrote another. So went most of the more than 1,900 comments.

The running comedian Laura Green posted an Instagram reel in which she pretended to be trying on the look (“We’re feeling pretty, um, breezy,” she said) and checking out the rest of the athlete’s kit bag, which turned out to include hair spray, lip gloss and a “hysterectomy kit,” so the women would not have to worry about periods.

When asked, Nike did not address the brouhaha directly, but according to John Hoke, the chief innovation officer, the woman’s bodysuit and the man’s shorts and top are only two of the options Nike will have for its Olympic runners. There are “nearly 50 unique pieces across men’s and women’s and a dozen competition styles fine-tuned for specific events,” Mr. Hoke said.

Sha’Carri Richardson

Women will be able to opt for compression shorts, a crop top or tank and a bodysuit with shorts rather than bikini bottoms. The full slate of looks was not on hand in Paris but more will be revealed next week at the U.S. Olympic Committee media summit in New York. The Paris reveal was meant to be a teaser.

Anna Cockrell.Credit...Dominique Maitre/WWD, via Getty Images

Mr. Hoke also pointed out that Nike consults with a large number of athletes at every stage of the uniform design. Its track and field roster includes Sha’Carri Richardson, who happened to be wearing the compression shorts during the Paris presentation, and Athing Mu. And there are certainly runners who like the high-cut brief. (The British Olympic sprinter Dina Asher-Smith, another Nike athlete, told The New York Times last summer that while she opts to run in briefs, she also leans toward a leotard style, rather than a two-piece.)

What Nike missed, however, was that in choosing those two looks as the primary preview for Team U.S.A., rather than, say, the matching shorts and tanks that will be also available, it shored up a longstanding inequity in sports — one that puts the body of a female athlete on display in a way it does not for the male athlete.

“Why are we presenting this sexualized outfit as the standard of excellence?” said Lauren Fleshman, a U.S. national champion distance runner and the author of “Good for a Girl.” “In part because we think that’s what nets us the most financial gain from sponsors or NIL opportunities, most of which are handed out by powerful men or people looking at it through a male gaze. But women are breaking records with ratings in sports where you don’t have to wear essentially a bathing suit to perform.”

The problem such imagery creates is twofold. When Nike chose to reveal the high-cut bodysuit as the first Olympics outfit, purposefully or not, the implication for anyone watching is that “this is what excellence looks like,” Ms. Fleshman said.

That perception filters down to young athletes and becomes the model girls think they have to adopt, often at a developmental stage when their relationships with their bodies are particularly fraught.

And more broadly, given the current political debate around adjudicating women’s bodies, it reinforces the idea that they are public property.

Still, Ms. Fleshman said, “I’m glad Nike put this image out as the crown jewel of Olympic Team design,” because it may act as the catalyst for another conversation that has been long overdue.

“If you showed this outfit to someone from the W.N.B.A. or women’s soccer, they would laugh in your face,” she said. “We shouldn’t have to normalize it for track and field anymore. Time’s up on that.”

[freneticfloetry]

In grand celebration of ACD’s birthday, the Red, White & Royal Box is officially live!

The RWRBox comes in two separate sizes, and each is chock full of FirstPrince jewelry, collectibles, and custom ephemera. Full details are available in the listing, but here’s a peek at each box, as well as a few of my favorite things.

Both boxes have decorative inside lids. The Curated Collection box sports a stylized “you and me and history” quote alongside firework art reminiscent of the collector’s edition cover, while the Complete Collection features a framed FirstPrince portrait by @ambiguouspenny, backed by architectural sketches of the White House and Kensington Palace and flanked with yellow and English tea roses.

(It is literally impossible to do that portrait justice in a photo. I keep trying, but it honestly has to be seen in person for full impact. The veladora art, meanwhile, has been my lockscreen for months.)

The canon ephemera was painstakingly recreated from real-life examples. There was no Wimbledon in 2020, obviously, but Alex’s gold-foiled pass is based on two recent tickets to the Royal Box. For Henry’s gold-embossed invite to the White House, I studied past State Dinner invitations until my eyes crossed (and went through four rounds of typesetting revisions to find the perfect Copperplate font). And as for his little souvenir from the Olympics… that was based on an actual ticket to a Rio 2016 diving event (not the finals, but still — I swear you can find anything on the internet if you just go far enough down the rabbit hole). Dates on the tickets are completely book accurate.

Both pieces of post-canon ephemera feature messages from Alex to Henry. Had to lean into my fanfic roots somehow.

Each bracelet comes with a set of standard charms by default (their initials, a wedding cake, a love letter, and either an aquamarine — their joint birthstone — or a silver heart and red, white, and royal blue glass pearls). Customization-wise, there are almost forty additional charms to choose from.

The silk ipê-amarelo blossoms are from vintage garlands made by a local vendor and sadly not available anymore. Which is tragic, since they’re absolutely perfect.

With a few exceptions (the trinket box, room spray bottle, noisemakers, and portrait frame) the non-print items included in each collection were all sourced from small businesses and independent creators.

The stash of vintage and antique Austens amassed for this is probably out of control. They’re all hardcover and in fantastic condition, and span all titles (though it is, admittedly, pretty P&P heavy). The latest is from 1980, but the earliest thus far is that amazing pocket edition of Sense & Sensibility, which is from 1913.

The linen & room spray is skin-safe, though (for me, at least) it’s much more an atmospheric scent than a wearable one. For the record, the notes are “bergamot, clean linen, fresh cut grass, roasted coffee, a dash of cinnamon, and a whisper of smoke.” One of these days I’ll stop spraying my room down with it every night before bed.

Henry’s journal is covered in grey suiting tweed and has a tiny silver fox foiled on the cover, which makes me irrationally happy every time I see it.

Alex’s (lurid teal) “Hoe Dameron” kimono is fully embroidered, not screen printed. It does indeed have pockets. :)

I know I’ve teased this project twice already, but after months of building it bit by bit, it’s amazing to have it done and out in the world. I love these boys, and I’m so excited for the fandom to see everything inside. And to anyone who actually does order a collection, i just want to say thank you here — as a multiracial AfroLatina with my own ally to questioning to queer journey, Alex and his story mean so much to me, and I loved getting to bring it to life in this way.

You can find the Red, White & Royal Box here, with a full breakdown of what’s included in each collection.

A portion of each sale benefits the Broadway Youth Center, which provides basic needs, health and social services, and gender-affirming care to LGBTQ+ young people here in Chicago experiencing homelessness and housing instability.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask away — my comments and inbox are open. :)

(And for my fellow Tarlos folks: you’re up next.)

I am once again tagging the FirstPrince mutuals: @rmd-writes @welcometololaland @three-drink-amy @orchidscript @firstprince-history-huh @never-blooms @liminalmemories21 @cha-melodius @lightningboltreader @danieljradcliffe @actual-sleeping-beauty

[adafruit]

🎄💾🗓️ Day 3: Retrocomputing Advent Calendar presents the Commodore VIC-20! 🎄💾🗓️

The VIC-20 ⌨️📺🕹️, released in 1980 by Commodore, was the first computer to sell over a million units. It had a 6502 CPU running at 1 MHz, 5 KB of RAM (expandable), and displayed up to 22 characters per line on a color-capable screen. An affordable and friendly computer, the VIC-20 was great at games and basic programming and was supported by a library of software and peripherals. It connected to TVs for display and included Commodore's BASIC interpreter for programming. Its success allowed other computers like the Commodore 64 to make its mark.

And since this is a #firstcomputer celebration here's a fantastic story from Jeff -

My first home computer was the Commodore VIC-20. I must have been in second grade (1986/1987). My Dad was working somewhere away from home, but one weekend Mom drove us two kids to spend the night at the motel that was his home base.

He had bought this computer, the VIC-20, and hooked it up to the hotel TV. I remember entering the program pictured below (probably Mom typed it in, actually) and being blown away by the birds flapping their wings across the screen.

The other distinct memory I have is the next morning my folks woke me up and asked whether I was hungry. No, I very much wanted to play with the VIC-20, so I made up the most obvious word that came to mind: "No, I'm Vic-y". I think they were very puzzled. We probably went and had breakfast regardless of whether we wanted to see the birds flying again.

Check out the wikipedia page for some great history, photos (pictured here), and more -

And the COMMODORE vic-20 commercial commercial compilation, featuring William Shatner.

Have first computer memories? Post’em up in the comments, or post yours on socialz’ and tag them #firstcomputer #retrocomputing - See you back here tomorrow!

[mitigatedchaos]

As someone correctly pointed out, the Trump McDonald's photoshoot is camp.

The man is a celebrity reality TV game show host who has had appearances at pro-wrestling matches. This is like if there were a commercial that featured Shaquille O'Neal working the drive-thru at McDonald's, only here, we get the 'backstage version.'

The argument is that this is a fake campaign stop by the politician Donald Trump, rather than a real shift at a McDonald's restaurant.

It's a fake in-person campaign stop by the politician Donald Trump, with, presumably, a few real McDonald's workers.

It's a real reality TV photoshoot of the celebrity businessman character "Donald Trump," who eats McDonald's food and drinks Diet Coke, for the campaign of politician Donald Trump.

The character "Donald Trump" is played by celebrity actor Donald Trump, who eats McDonald's food and drinks Diet Coke. His enjoyment of french fries is authentic.

It's a behind-the-scenes look at the reality TV photoshoot of the campaign ad for politician Donald Trump, featuring celebrity actor Donald Trump, showing us the cameras and set.

The shirt, tie, apron, and lighting are a callback to the 1980s, the time most associated with the brash businessman persona of the character "Donald Trump," seen in movies such as 1992's Home Alone.

The shirt, tie, and apron while serving food at a burger joint feel like a callback to the 1950s, and there are lots of photos online of McDonald's managers looking a lot like this from the 1970s. It has a very "Americana" feel.

It's a real 21st-century campaign PR event spread across social media (with lots of photos and clips circulating) and news media, being used for memes, causing arguments or discourse that cause it to spread even farther.

Win or lose, this is beyond just a campaign ad. Is it authentically inauthentic? This is some kind of performance art.

[soft-homestyle]

Sean Connery

-

Stay cozy.

@soft-homestyle

[twixnmix]

Bette Davis celebrating her 50th year in films and the opening of her film "The Watcher in the Woods" at Tavern on the Green in New York City on April 16, 1980.

Photos by Andy Warhol

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Hugh Dougherty at The Daily Beast:

Jeffrey Epstein described himself as Donald Trump’s “closest friend” and claimed intimate knowledge of his proclivity for sex, including cuckolding his best friends, according to recordings obtained exclusively by the Daily Beast. The convicted pedophile even boasted of his closeness to Trump and his now-wife Melania by claiming, “the first time he slept with her was on my plane,” which was dubbed the Lolita Express.

Epstein spoke at length about Trump with the author Michael Wolff in August 2017, two years before being found dead in his jail cell. Wolff was researching his bombshell bestseller Fire and Fury at the time. The recordings cast more light on Trump’s long relationship with Epstein, and will add to debate over the character of the Republican candidate, especially his attitudes and conduct toward women, just days before the election. The tapes tell Epstein’s version of the relationship between two former friends and their very different paths: One toward infamy, prison and suicide; the other toward power, the Oval Office and his own criminal conviction for paying hush money to a porn star. Trump’s camp referred to the tapes’ release as “false smears” and “election interference.” The tapes also offer unusual insight into the friendship of two wealthy, powerful men who frequently went out on the town together, prowling for women in New York and Atlantic City. [...]

Asked by Wolff, “How do you know all this?” Epstein replied, “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.” Wolff shared the tape with the Daily Beast ahead of discussing it on his Fire and Fury podcast on Monday. Last Thursday he caused shockwaves by revealing a few seconds of a separate recording in which Epstein spoke in detail about the inner workings of the Trump administration. Wolff also said Thursday that the pedophile showed off photos of Trump with topless young women sitting in his lap. Wolff, a veteran journalist and author who was also the biographer of Rupert Murdoch, has long attracted praise and bromides. When Fire & Fury was published in January 2018, Trump tried to stop it with a failed cease and desist order, then threatened to sue. No case ever materialized, and it sold 5 million copies worldwide. Wolff, who appears regularly on his Fire and Fury podcast, wrote two more books on Trump after Fire and Fury, and about Epstein in 2021’s Too Famous.

Wolff says he has up to 100 hours of recordings of interviews with Epstein, including from using him as a source for Fire and Fury, and from years of meetings when the disgraced financier appeared to want Wolff to write a biography of him. Wolff said he decided to release parts of the archive after a new accuser, a former Miss Switzerland, alleged last week that Trump had groped her in 1992.

[...] Trump’s long friendship with Epstein, which spanned the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s has been well documented. In the 1990s, the two publicly partied at Mar-a-Lago and went to a Victoria’s Secret Angels show together. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine of Epstein, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Epstein’s infamous leaked addressbooks had Trump’s own phone number as well as Melania’s, while Trump’s name appeared seven times in the passenger logs of Epstein’s planes. (The books and logs also included princes, politicians and potentates such as Bill Clinton, former British prime minister Tony Blair, former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, Prince Andrew and celebrities and billionaires including Mick Jagger and Les Wexner.)

[...] In 2022 Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who procured him underage girls, would be sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for the sex trafficking of minors. Upon hearing of her arrest in 2020, Trump, then president, said he wished her well. “Her friend or boyfriend was either killed or committed suicide in jail. Yeah, I wish her well… Good luck.” In 2004, Epstein and Trump fell out when they both tried to buy a Palm Beach estate, Maison de L’Amitié, out of bankruptcy. The next year, the FBI began investigating Epstein for child sex trafficking.

In 2019, on the day after Epstein’s arrest, Trump said in the Oval Office, “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you,” and that they had not been friends for 15 years. He said it “did not much matter” what the fall-out had been over. This September, asked about Epstein by the tech podcaster Lex Fridman, Trump said: “He was a good salesman. He was a hailing, hearty type of guy. He had some nice assets that he’d throw around like islands, but a lot of big people went to that island. But fortunately, I was not one of them.”

[...]

The Epstein tape includes an allegation—which is impossible to verify—that Trump had an affair with a politician while in the White House. Epstein offered no proof or sourcing for the claim. He also alleged that Trump cheated on both his first wife Ivana and second wife Marla Maples with “a Black girl.” At one section, Epstein used a Yiddish racial slur to refer to Black women and alleged Trump boasted to him, “I’m f---ing all these Black women.” The tape mixes sexual allegations with other aspects of Trump’s life. Early in the recording Epstein is heard to say, “You probably know he had a scalp reduction. He’s getting the same male pattern baldness that we all have. He had his scalp reduced. It’s hysterical.” Trump has long refused to release full medical records while his White House medical reports did not disclose any prior surgeries.

“He’s charming. In a devious way, he’s charming. To some extent it’s a typical tragedy where he believes his own bulls---”

— Epstein on Trump

And Epstein offers his eyewitness account of Trump Tower and Trump’s office where, he said, Trump had “fake honors” on the wall. Trump, he claimed, would yell at his personal assistant Rhona Graff, “who’s a loyal, perfect, secretary,” as well as Matthew Calamari Snr., his bodyguard, and Michael Cohen, his attorney who is now an enemy. Epstein compared Trump to “an emotionally challenged 9-year-old,” and said, “He screams and yells at Rhona more than anybody else. His screaming is how he treats people. He has a tantrum, not a temper. If you don’t understand him, it’s frightening. Once you understand him, it’s sort of silly.” Epstein also told Wolff he had positive things to say about Trump. “He’s charming. In a devious way, he’s charming,” he said. “To some extent it’s a typical tragedy where he believes his own bulls---. He has delusions of grandiosity, then he takes it on board.” He added that he had a “self-deprecating nature” and was “not vulgar.” “He’s funny,” Epstein said. “Self-awareness means you’re self-aware. He’s aware of that person, Donald Trump. He talks about The Trump, The Trumpster. ‘Trump’s getting laid.’”

On the tape Epstein, speaking in a New York accent, also mentioned the rich and powerful. (In a deposition released after his death Epstein admitted under oath that he dropped the names of people he had never met.) The names he mentioned on tape include: Former president Bill Clinton; Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner; then-Defense Secretary James Mattis; and the billionaires Carl Icahn and Tom Barrack, both of whom are friends of Trump. Clinton was a long-standing friend of Epstein but has denied any association after the pedophile’s disgrace in the mid-2000s. Mattis has no known association with him. Ivanka was photographed with him as a child but Kushner has never been known to be linked to him. Barrack appeared in a leaked appointment diary for Epstein from 2016, while Carl Icahn, a corporate raider and long-time Trump friend, was in Epstein’s 1997 address book. Startlingly for a man who became one of the world’s most notorious sex offenders, Epstein on the tapes offers a damning judgment of Trump, telling Wolff, “The moral compass just does not exist.”

The Daily Beast reported that Jeffrey Epstein was Donald Trump's closest friend for about 10 years, according to tapes obtained from the outlet that featured Michael Wolff interviewing the late pedophile.

[yourfavgaygaijingal]

GAL HISTORY

ₓ˚. ୭ ˚○◦˚.˚◦○˚ ୧ .˚ₓ

The Peak of the Kogyaru: 1993-1998

At the end of our last installment, the gyaru movement had spontaneously erupted in Shibuya — but in small numbers. These delinquent private high-school girls with light brown hair, tanned skin, and sexualized uniforms became known as kogyaru in certain circles, but they were still unknown to most of their peers.

Since the days of the Taiyo-zoku and Roppongi-zoku of the 1950s, upper-class delinquent subcultures have spread their influence to the middle classes through the mass media. And in most of these cases, the media first reports on the new culture as a moral panic.

From fantasy to moral panic

Japan’s quite expansive selection of shūkanshi weekly men’s magazines, such as SPA!, Weekly Playboy, and Friday, dedicate dozens of pages each week on celebrity gossip, glossy bikini and topless photos, reviews of sex services, and phony stories of naughty housewives. They do not, generally, take much interest in the latest fashion trends for young women.

Yet ironically it was these very magazines that first noticed the kogyaru phenomenon and arguably standardized the subculture’s name as “kogyaru.” Sociologist Namba Koji found what may be the earliest direct mention of the subculture in SPA! from June 1993 in an article called “The Temptation of Kogyaru”「コギャルの誘惑」. The article’s writer breathlessly tells his readers about the kogyaru clan and how they have become his new sexual infatuation.

The kogyaru emerged just as Japanese men grew bored with the 1980s’ obsession over female college students — the so-called “joshi daisei” boom. Beyond the kogyaru, men’s media were already lowering their gaze to secondary education.

The March 24, 1993 issue of Takarajima, for example, ran an article about the purchasing of sexual favors from high school girls, complete with a price guide (Namba 2006). The overall message to male readers was that the new generation of teenage girls had — very conveniently — embraced consumerism and materialism so fully that they no longer felt qualms about selling their own bodies.

This was also an era when a new suite of communication technologies provided greater independence to young women — playing right into many of the men’s magazine fantasies. Tokyo high school girls in the early 1990s, especially those in kogyaru circles, started carrying around primitive pagers called pokeberu (“pocket bell”) to send numerical messages to friends.

By the mid-1990s, these threads crystallized into the greatest moral panic of the entire decade — enjo kōsai. The term, meaning technically “compensated companionship,” became a widely-used euphemism for teenage prostitution and a buzz word of the era. Former egg editor Yonehara Yasumasa claims that enjo kōsai began as a mischievous but relatively innocent way of playing pranks on middle-aged men.

This unfortunately became a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more the media reported on the shocking phenomenon, the more that the small percentage of girls who were looking to sell themselves ended up flocking to the streets of Shibuya and finding buyers. There is no doubt that many schoolgirls did prostitute themselves in this era, but it remains unclear today how widespread the phenomenon was.

Nevertheless enjo kōsai became the defining issue of the era. Academic David Leheny later wrote“There is a case to be made that the kogal image epitomized Japan’s hazily defined crisis of the 1990s at least as well as did layoffs by top Japanese firms.” Conservative moralists used the trend as evidence that society had become overly materialistic and that society was decaying rapidly.

So by the mid-1990s, Japanese male sexual culture became obsessed with high school girls, the mass media became obsessed with schoolgirl immorality, and right in the middle of this, a brand new sexually-styled delinquent subculture had shown up in Shibuya.

Yet it is becoming clearer now that despite twenty years of stereotypes, the kogyaru were not the core practitioners of enjo kōsai. Famed sexual health doctor Akaeda Tsuneo, who has spent his years giving free consultations to teen girls in Tokyo, explained to Takarajima in February 2008 that “The girls called gyaru had too much pride and weren’t the ones doing enjo kōsai” (Kurihara).

The gyaru’s style, attitude, and Louis Vuitton bags, however, made them fit the stereotype, and they faced both the wrath of moral authorities as well as the constant advances of older men in the streets. A former kogyaru interviewed on website Tokyo Damage Report noted that “You’d get old guys who would say, ‘How much for sex?’ Some would hint, some would just start negotiating without any pre-amble.

This battle against the media and adults ended up changing the gyaru subculture in many ways. The aforementioned Yonehara Yasumasa believes that the kogyaru’s constant harassment from older men is what led to the development of their famously gruff and masculine speech. They turned inward — sexy to their own group, but angry and intimidating to outsiders. And as we will see in the next installment, this move away from open sexuality focused the gyaru on impressing fellow subculture members with extreme dress rather than wearing “cute” things to attract boys.

While the enjo kōsai controversy certainly tarred the gyaru subculture for years to come, at least by the mid-1990s, every single person in Japan had heard of it.

Kogyaru as fashion market

While the country debated the morality of schoolgirls, the schoolgirls themselves were busy shuffling into Shibuya and taking up influence from the kogyaru’s approach to dress. The Shibuya style may have been simple to replicate — chapatsu light brown hair, slight tan, hiked up school girl uniform, loose socks — but the original subculture also depended upon a certain social position and attitude. Since the kogyaru descended from an actual group of people and not the direction of the fashion industry, they were not instantly imitable.

So how would a new kogyaru recruit figure out how to properly dress in the style? When the kogyaru reached mass consciousness in the mid-1990s, there were still no dedicated “gyaru” magazines that worked with “gyaru” brands to show a step-by-step guide on becoming a “gyaru.”

There was, however, a shopping complex with increasing centrality to the subculture. In the early 1990s, both kogyaru and their older paragyaru-type tanned party-girl big sisters had patronized a store called Me Jane in a generally-ignored fashion building called Shibuya 109. Known later in gyaru circles as just “maru-kyu,” Shibuya 109 opened in 1979 but never achieved any level of popularity in its first decade. Fashion business analyst Kawashima Yoko described its early days as “Like Marui, but worse.” With Me Jane, however, the building finally started to attract a dedicated clientele. Soon kogyaru moved beyond Me Jane and started hanging out next door in a clothing store Love Boat and in the shoe brand ESPERANZA (Kawashima 178). The brands all focused on a sexy, summery style, with shirts, for example, that showed off the belly button.

Shibuya 109’s owner Tokyu noticed this sudden interest in their flailing complex and decided to do a “renewal” of the building in the mid-1990s, asking more stores of the kogyaru fashion variety to become tenants. This turned 109 into the gyaru shopping mecca we know today. As kogyaru wannabees poured into Shibuya, they made a beeline to 109 and essentially understood any store in the building as selling “gyaru” clothing. In this period, Me Jane saw double digit growth every year, ultimately making ¥700 million a year in Shibuya alone (Namba 2006).

Besides the financial success, the establishment of 109 as a legitimate location for kogyaru style meant that the brands inside were now pumping out thousands of new garments that could be used to build a “kogyaru” outfit. No longer did girls need the uniform — they could wear mid-riffs from Me Jane and ESPERANZA platform sandals. Hardcore adherents wore “flare mini-skirts from surfer brand Alba Rosa, bustiers, blue mascara and pink rouge” along with the standard chapatsu and salon tan (Okamoto quoted in Namba 2006). In expanding the look, the kogyaru unwittingly opened up their growing subculture to girls who were not in the proper Tokyo social status to participate before. Anyone who shopped at Shibuya 109 could now potentially become a kogyaru, making the style open to non-Tokyo girls and the middle classes.

Even now Shibuya 109 is the main fashion instigator for gyaru style. One of the reasons for the complex’s enduring success has been the brands’ innovation in retailing methods, namely creating strong relations between customer and shop clerk. In the late-1990s, many of the original kogyaru started to get jobs at 109 shops, and they became authoritative figures of the movement. Referred to as “super charisma clerks” (スーパーカリスマ店員), these 20-something workers took their responsibilities far beyond mere in-store transactions and acted as spokespeople in the media for their brands.

So while Shibuya 109 marked the mediation and commercialization of the once organic kogyaru style, the retail structure helped keep the actual girls in control of setting trends — rather than big brands and magazine editors.

GAL WAS NEVER MEANT TO BECOME CLEAN OR WATERDOWN!!!!!