“Archive Dive” is a periodic series by Welcome Magazine that sources scans from important physical cultural archives, alongside context on the people and traditions behind them. This installment documents FRUiTS, Japan’s defining youth fashion magazine.
Written and Curated by @_cj____________
FRUiTS (1997–2017) is Japan’s defining street fashion magazine. At the time, it introduced readers around the world to the pioneering style of Harajuku’s sidewalks. Today, it serves as an enduring record of Japanese youth culture, and sets the gold standard for street style photography.
FRUiTS was the brainchild of Shoichi Aoki, who worked as a computer programmer in Tokyo before quitting his job to wander Europe. In Paris, he developed the habit of stopping people on the street to photograph their outfits.
This practice grew into an archive, and that archive eventually became STREET, an international street fashion magazine focused on candid looks from Paris, New York, Antwerp, Berlin, and beyond. He was, by his own account, one of the first to archive what people were actually wearing, instead of the curated photo sets of the advertising and editorial worlds.
After a decade of collecting work for STREET, Aoki returned to Tokyo and discovered an emerging street fashion scene among the Japanese youth. Rather than following popularized American and European trends, Harajuku youth were mixing traditional Japanese garments (kimonos, getas) with handmade, secondhand, and designer clothing pieces, all with a somewhat futuristic bend.
In 1997, Aoki gave them their own magazine. He named it FRUiTS because the outfits felt fresh to him.
The format never changed: a photograph of a person (or a group of them) on one full page, along with a short profile detailing age, occupation, and outfit. This clinical, documentarian approach fit with Aoki’s ethos; he didn’t consider himself a photographer, but a “street fashion collector.”
Some of the notable brands captured in FRUiTS include:
FOTUS
Jean Paul Gaultier
Hysteric Glamour
Takuya Angel
Jupiter
& more…
FRUiTS continued printing into the late 2010s, but is still most known for documenting the glory days of Tokyo youth’s fashion in the late 90s and early 2000s. By the 2010s, fast fashion had replaced independent shops, and street style had simmered down, becoming more homogeneous with Western trends.
When Aoki finally sunset the magazine in February 2017 after 233 issues, his reasoning was simple, and somber:
So instead of taking a general survey of FRUiTS, for this Archive Dive we decided to focus on a single exceptional year: 1998. The magazine’s second year. A time when the street style of Harajuku was in full bloom, and the cool kids were still around.
Enjoy.
All scans from Welcome Magazine
