FRUiTS, the Legendary Japanese Street Style Magazine, Is Back

Before street style photographers and street style blogs, there was FRUiTS. The Japanese magazine, founded in 1997 by photographer Shoichi Aoki, chronicled the style of the different groups of young people that often hung out in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. I don’t remember how exactly I found out that it existed, but I remember being transfixed by the subjects of the photographs. It wasn’t just the fact that they were all impossibly cool, but that everyone’s approach to getting dressed was completely different than anything I had ever seen—even the clothes were different. In the pages of FRUiTS, a pair of overalls could be retro or futuristic or from an unnamed, unknown period, simply by the placement of a lone, floating zipper fly on an otherwise-untouched silhouette. In 2001 Phaidon published a book of the same name that collected the first years of images and it became a bible of sorts. I never started dressing like any of the people I so admired, but looking through its pages again and again inspired a feeling not unlike revisiting a favorite book of poetry, I think. 

Now 25 years after it launched, the first issue of FRUiTS is being made available in English as an ePub. “Our goal is to make this valuable archive accessible to anyone around the world. The English edition is the first step towards that goal,” Aoki shared via email. Seeing the images again, this time understanding the descriptions appended to each, added another layer to the images. Along with the (now-requisite) brand credits that make up an outfit, the subjects identify who did their hair (very often the charming answer is “a friend”), as well as their “style points” (often a general inspiration vibe or a highlight of their outfit), with answers ranging from “kawaii punk,” to “dynamite detective,” to simply “pajamas.”