Lolitas, mountain witches and sexy gals: Japanese fashion as rebellious style from the Lost Decades to now

Kerr, H-Y ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0852-5720, 2025. Lolitas, mountain witches and sexy gals: Japanese fashion as rebellious style from the Lost Decades to now. Fashion Highlight Journal (5), pp. 102-111. ISSN 2975-0466

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Abstract

Coinciding with the global economic stagnation of the 2010s has been a rise in the adoption of Japanese youth fashions of the 1990s and 2000s, called the Lost Decades. A time of prolonged economic stagnation in Japan, these street-fashion subcultures became known for their vibrancy and originality in resisting wider narratives of high youth unemployment and being labelled the Lost Generation. This paper explores the street-fashions of gyaru and Lolita, as proponents of a rebellious Japanese youth fashioning heterotopias of their own making, challenging prevailing narratives of femininity through social deviance, soft rebellion, and mortality. Comparing them to UK gyaru and Lolita communities, it explores how these styles are evolving to answer different subcultural needs outside Japan, which has been little studied. While capturing imaginations of youth globally, they bring into question as new knowledge the meaning of Japan to a new disenfranchised youth and the ethics of adopting subcultural dress from other cultures. Locating it within the specific cultural and historic environment of the Lost Decades, often understudied in relation to these subjects, this paper emphasises the need to reposition these fashion subcultures against the specific conditions within which they are practiced to better understand their underlying implications.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Fashion Highlight Journal
Creators:	Kerr, H.-Y.
Publisher:	Firenze University Press
Date:	2025
Number:	5
ISSN:	2975-0466
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.36253/fh-3531 DOI 2560826 Other
Rights:	© Author(s). This is an open access, peer-reviewed article published by Firenze University Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham School of Art & Design
Record created by:	Jeremy Silvester
Date Added:	23 Jan 2026 12:02
Last Modified:	23 Jan 2026 12:02
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/55104

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