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 Aimed at City Girls looking for a City Style it lasted for only a few issues before it was withdrawn, radically retooled and reissued.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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The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984: these weren’t the first dystopian novels. There's an interesting history of Victorian and Edwardian literature looking at the impact of modernity on humans and finding it worrying.
Today in pulp I look at some early dystopian books…
Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1863, was the second novel penned by Jules Verne. However his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel rejected it as too gloomy. The manuscript was only discovered in 1994 when Verne’s grandson hired a locksmith to break into an old family safe.
The novel, set in 1961, warns of the dangers of a utilitarian culture. Paris has street lights, motor cars and the electric chair but no artists or writers any more. Instead industry and commerce dominate and citizens see themselves as cogs in a great economic machine.
In January 1919 a new magazine heralded the dawn of the Weimar era. Its aesthetic was a kind of demented Jugendstil, and its stories were dark gothic fantasies.
This is the story of Der Orchideengarten...
Der Orchideengarten: Phantastische Blätter (The orchid garden: fantastic pages) is probably the first ever fantasy magazine. Published in Munich by Dreiländerverlag, a trial issue appeared in 1918 before the first full 24 page edition was published in January 1919.
"The orchid garden is full of beautiful - now terribly gruesome, now satirically pleasing - graphic jewelery" announced the advanced publicity. It was certainly a huge departure from the Art Nouveau of Jugend magazine, which German readers were already familiar with.
If stock photography has taught us one thing it's how to recognise a hacker! But how much do we really know about these shady characters, with their ill-fitting balaclavas and their Windows 7 laptops?
Here's my essential stock photography guide to cybersecurity...
First things first, hacking has come on leaps and bounds in the last few years. Backing up your sensitive data on C60 cassette and labelling it "Flock of Seagulls Megamix' is no longer enough to keep your information safe!
And hackers are actually very hard to spot. That's because they dress head-to-toe in black (or very very very dark grey) since they live on the Dark Web and want to blend into the background.