The April edition of Index magazine carries two articles by me: one's a piece about style scouts, the other a short text about Japanese street fashion magazine FRUiTS.



Here's an extract from the piece about the commodification of style. It's called...

Give Me Denim Or Give Me Death!

B: We know that orientalism was just the other side of the coin of imperialism, don't we? I mean, with one hand the West was sending gunboats to force Japan to open up to trade and with the other it was writing 'Madame Butterfly'. We don't do that now, do we? We aren't so hypocritical.

A: See, that's the problem. Now we just march in. We still do the colonialist thing. We still invade other cultures and erase their differences. What we don't do any more is romanticize the victim. We see bad differences we can erase, but not good differences we can learn from. There are no more traveller's tales, no more Lawrence of Arabia, no more harem lore. That was misinformed! That was politically incorrect! That was a projection! Our Lawrence of Arabia is John Walker Lindh, and he's misguided, a baddy. There's no 'Madame Baghdad' running on Broadway! Don't book seats for 'Blue Domes of Ispahan' -- if it comes at all it'll just be a caption on CNN. We have neo-imperialism without neo-romanticism. The worst of both worlds.