Hasta La Gadget!

Click for our 2008 Tokyo Girl’s Collection report

The Tokyo Girls Collection is best known for blending forward-thinking e-commerce strategies with the appeal of a classic stadium extravaganza. While three dozen popular domestic fashion brands stage runway shows of their latest looks, audience members can purchase the items as seen immediately with their mobile phones through a dedicated mobile retail site. The event also eschews typical fashion world exclusivity by offering a general admission ticket for just $40 (less than a typical concert ticket), regularly attracting a crowd of 20,000 plus teens and 20-somethings.

According to organizers, a remarkable 57 million yen ($580k) worth of merchandise was sold during the event as users accessed their phones to grab the latest looks as they were first revealed on the catwalk.

Below is a report from our friends at Diginfo News

Event producer Branding Inc. is the media company behind top portal and retail websites Girlswalker.com and Fashionwalker.com. According to a survey conducted last season by the company, 85.6% of respondents in their teens or twenties spend nearly 100 minutes on the mobile internet per day and more than 70% have used their mobile phones to shop at least once in the last year.

Now in its 8th season the Tokyo Girls Collection also features an increasing number of partner booths and presentations, collaboration projects, and spin-off activities in addition to the mainstay fashion shows and pop singer performances. Event partners include leaders from diverse industries, such as cosmetics, automotive, and food & beverage.

Trend Potential
The Tokyo Girl’s Collection is a big deal, not just for fashion, but for mobile, e-commerce, publishing, New Media, and more. This is why we go to every TGC and document it top to bottom with sound analysis on the trends, marketing collaborations, and technology behind the events. For our full report and the connection to related global trends, you’ll find it all in the Trendpool. For companies and individuals interested in experiencing the action themselves, our Tokyo Trend Tours can integrate the next TGC event with a full retail experience in the city.

The Yomiuri Shinbun has reported that Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) has recently declared three of Japan’s pretty young things to be Pop Culture Ambassadors of the country…at least for their respective niche fashion groups.

Models Misako Aoki, Yu Kimura, and Shizuka Fujioka have been drafted to represent the lolitas, gyaru, and high school girls of the Nation of Cute, and travel the world promoting Japanese pop culture.

First stop: The upcoming Japan Fest in Bangkok, followed by a summertime stint at the Japan Expo in Paris.

Besides being a clear opportunity for bureaucrats to hang out with young girls, MOFA’s move is one of many in a government movement to promote Cool Japan, the idea that modern Japanese culture can be boxed up, branded, and exported for consumption. In many ways this is true, in the form of manga, anime, video games, and fashion, but these have been highly organic trends that came from the bottom up. Is government truly able to push Japanese trends onto the world to become global trends?

We said previously that the organizers of Tokyo fashion trade show Rooms have a number of antennas out, and they definitely are picking up a few different trend waves. Here is another example: Rooms Link Shibuya Triangle.

For the duration of the three-day invitation-only event, Rooms is holding collaboration events for the general public at two well-known retail spaces, Omotesando Hills and Parco department store in Shibuya. This is the first time that the trade show has directly appealed to consumers, following a general trend towards giving the (purchasing) public a taste of traditionally closed industry-only events.

At Omotesando Hills the collaboration took the form of wall panels from artist Ryoono (who is also exhibiting at Rooms) as well as an exhibit with items from the exhibition.

Meanwhile Parco, under the theme “Pair Look,” has a number of special edition branded “his and hers” products on display in the 6th floor Parco Factory.

There is also a neat display at the entrance of photos of couples from years past (taken as actually street shots for Parco’s culture magazine Across). Each of the life-sized portraits has a mirror for a face allowing shoppers to imagine what they may have looked like in, say, 1984.

Trend Potential
Rooms Link Shibuya Triangle represents a real shift in the fashion industry’s attitude towards guarding its exclusivity and giving in to consumer demand. The Trendpool explores other consumer-centric industry trends from fashion to crowdsourced FMCG.

The digital lifestyle application in development from Tonchidot, makes its first public appearance in Japan at the fashion trade show Rooms.

Tonchidot’s “Sekai Camera” made its Japanese debut in the most unusual place: at Tokyo fashion trade show Rooms. While the Japanese creators have presented this iPhone application to “tag the real world” at noteworthy expos overseas (like TechCrunch 50 in San Francisco), they had yet to demonstrate it in their home country.

To catch you up, Sekai Camera (“world camera” in Japanese) is an Augmented Reality iPhone application in development that offers users “pop-up” information about their surroundings, as viewed through the camera screen. Touch any of the approaching icons to pull up the corresponding information into the frame or drop it into your “pocket” for later. Put simply, it’s a kind of Second Life spatial interaction for your, err, first life.

Visitors to a space can also tag the place themselves through comments, photos, and eventually voice recordings, viewed by friends or the public depending on filter settings.

But returning to the first point—it was the fashion industry that got a sneak peak of this future-forward technology. More specifically Rooms is a high-profile, yet invitation only, trade show attended by thousands of buyers, designers, and press. Nonetheless these are professionals who, by reputation, are typically more interested in things more tangible and less tech-y.

Trend Potential

We have been covering the increasing convergence of fashion retail and digital lifestyle trends for some time. To read the rest of this review with more depth, as well as connections to similar trends, you’ll find it all in the Trendpool.