Today in pulp I try to decipher 1980s Japanese street style, with the help of Olive: The Magazine for Romantic Girls!
This may involve frills...
Street style is an ever changing mix of styles, brands, attitudes and poses with various influences. And you normally have to be in the right place at the right time to capture it.
Which is where magazines come in! Photograping, documenting and deconstructing fashion never goes out of style, and in the late 1970s Japanese youth had one key guide to help them: Popeye!
Popeye was the Magazine for City Boys, with the City Style - a bit Preppy, a bit Paninaro- becoming one of the dominant '80s looks. At least for the chaps.
Women's street style was a more complicated affair on Japan with many competing trends. Kawaii - the aesthetic of cuteness - vied with Otome ("maiden style"), Lolita, Pink House, Prarie Look and many other influences in the 1980s.
So in 1982 the publishers of Popeye released a new magazine: Olive. Aimed at City Girls looking for a City Style it lasted for only a few issues before it was withdrawn, radically retooled and reissued.
Olive: The Magazine for Romantic Girls hit the newsstands in 1983 and for many years was the go-to guide for Japanese street style.
But what was the "Romantic Look" and where did it come from?
Well ther were a number of Olive styles over the years. The classic look was French high school style - Lycéene - with lots of volume and details.
Natural Kei, often associated with the Pink House label, involved soft patterns and lots of layering. Long skirts were the norm.
Character fashion was also a notable influence, with fashion styles reflecting popular singers and bands from Madonna to Bananarama.
By the early '90s the focus had moved from specific brands towards specific ways of combining clothes and accessories. How you wore it mattered more than what you wore.
And by the mid-90s the French high school lok was giving way to Schoolgirl Style, although Olive Girls still wove the maiden-type aesthetic through them.
The Age of Magazines may be passing, but Instagram can't replace the well-curated insights or the sheer pleasure of a good fashion magazine. So here's to Olive and all the Romantic Girls it influenced!
More stories another time...
(Big 6th form common room vibes here...)
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What are the pulp archetypes? Pulp novels are usually written quickly and rely on a formula, but do they use different archetypal characters to other fiction?
Let's take a look at a few...
The Outlaw is a classic pulp archetype: from Dick Turpin onwards lawbreakers have been a staple of the genre. Crime never pays, but it's exciting and trangressive!
Some pulp outlaws however are principled...
As Bob Dylan sang "to live outside the law you must be honest." Michel Gourdon's 1915 hero Dr Christopher Syn is a good example. A clergyman turned pirate and smuggler, he starts as a revenger but becomes the moral magistrate of the smuggling gangs of Romney Marsh.
Given the current heatwave, I feel obliged to ask my favourite question: is it time to bring back the leisure suit?
Let's find out...
Now we all know what a man's lounge suit is, but if we're honest it can be a bit... stuffy. Formal. Businesslike. Not what you'd wear 'in da club' as the young folks say.
So for many years tailors have been experimenting with less formal, but still upmarket gents attire. The sort of garb you could wear for both a high level business meeting AND for listening to the Moody Blues in an espresso bar. Something versatile.
Today in pulp I look back at the publishing phenomenon of gamebooks: novels in which YOU are the hero!
A pencil and dice may be required for this thread...
Gamebooks are a simple but addictive concept: you control the narrative. At the end of each section of the story you are offered a choice of outcomes, and based on that you turn to the page indicated to see what happens next.
Gamebook plots are in fact complicated decision tree maps: one or more branches end in success, but many more end in failure! It's down to you to decide which path to tread.