Hasta La Gadget!

A week of girls shopping activities at Shibuya Parco opened last night with a party that surprised passers by. Shoppers and those on the street were treated to the talents of girl dance group Tokyo DOLORES. A temporary stage on the street outside the venue became an impromptu pole dancing stage as the dancing troupe opened up the “Shibuya Girls Bunkasai” event that will run for the next week in the department store.

Playing on the halloween timing, the girls strolled though the strore lobby in their trademark goth costumes giving out candy to those in store before heading to the stage. A modern dance interpretation of pole dancing, the set was an impressive mix of acrobatics and dance. The girls entertained the growing crowd with some pretty spectacular movements as they spun themselves around the poles on stage.

Although the whole event is aimed at the female market there were plenty of pleasantly surprised “Salary Men” on their way home from the office amongst them. The girls have started to make quite a name for themselves over the last year performing burlesque type shows in Japan and at venues in America also, opening the Coney Island FIlm Festival and even an impromptu performance on a NYC subway train!

Bunkasai events, a type of “cultural festival” are popular students festival in Japan and the Parco promotion will appeal to the young crowd that populate the Shibuya area. The dancing kicked off a whole week of events at the location with various music and fashion related activities, which is off the back of Japan Fashion Week and in the run up to Tokyo’s Fashion’s Night Out.

Following Tokyo DOLORES also at the event was artist colectiveChim Pom’s Ellie who carried on the party behind the turntable. Chim Pon, who have talked about before, have been gaining a lot more exposure since their Banksy-esque stunt adding the Fukushima nuclear power plant image to Okamoto Taro’s “Myth Of Tomorow” mural in Shibuya station.

The events at Shibuya Parco are on from 27/10 through to 11/6,and details can be found on their site

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We have previously talked about the number of innovative projects that have sprung up in the wake of the events in North Japan. Another fantastic project that caught our eye at the recent Tokyo Fashion Week, and is already harvesting results, aims at turning damaged lands in the Sendai area into fertile grounds for fashion. The big collaboration project that now includes more than 20 apparel manufacturers and retailers, was initiated by people from the textile and fashion industry such as Kondo Kenichi of Taishoboseki Industries,, in order to commence cotton farming in Tohoku area, where hundreds of hectares of land were devastated by the tsunami.

In the tsunami the rice paddies in these areas were not only destroyed, but left with high concentration levels of saline. “When the salt concentration level in the soil exceeds 0.2% it is impossible to grow rice on it, but cotton can grow on soil with 0.5% to 0.6% salt concentration” says Kondo.
The attempt of the Tohoku Cotton Project aims to create long term employment for the rice farmers by planting cotton crops on what used to be rice farms before the disaster. The cotton seeds were provided to affected farms and Taishoboseki buys up the cotton crops to spin them. The spun yarn is used to create commercial products and will eventually reach consumers.

Actual product sales are expected to commence in January 2012 and since the demand is already higher than anticipated, Taishoboseki plans to blend harvested cotton with other organic cotton to create approximately 20 tons of yarn.

The project is generating a lot of attention, especially after the recent Tokyo Fashion Week where top fashion designer Yuma Koshino announced her participation in the project and will be launching her products together with Japan Airline (JAL) for her next collection.

Other apparel brands such as Urban research, Lee and Lowrys Farm to name a few, are also delivering their message “Don’t forget Tohoku! We are still alive!” with the vision of seeing in the near future a sea of white cotton fields that spread far and wide all over the Sendai area and more importantly give residents employment and a new sustainable lifestyle.

Images courtesy of Openers

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Global affairs magazine Monocle continued it’s expansion into new sectors over the weekend, opening up it’s first ever Monocle Cafe. Friday saw the opening party of the new Mens Hankyu department store in Tokyo which houses the new Monocle Cafe along with 8 floors of luxury mens brands.

The spacious cafe, in the basement of the department strore, also houses a small MONOCLE shop which is an addition to the other two MONOCLE shop’s in Osaka and in Tokyo’s upscale Aoyama neighborhood in the FrancFranc store. Natural materials have been used in the design of the interior which features furnishings from Japanese classic furniture brand Maruni, whose furniture was designed in collaboration with Naoto Fukasawa. The whole design concept is in keeping with Monocle’s image and branding, a modern approach which also takes into account traditional methods, clean and simple.

Regular visitors to Japan Trends will also remember the smiling face of Eiichi Kunitomo, pictured below. Kunitomo is the barista and man behind Omotesando Koffee, and he has been put in charge of overseeing the coffee and sweets menu at the new Monocle Cafe. This is certainly good news for coffee lovers who can expect the same high level of coffee found at Kunitomo’s own tiny space, (with the actual Monocle Tokyo office being just behind Omotesando Koffee, I expect frequent visits have certainly influenced this!).

“We’ve long been interested in doing a cafe and are excited by the prospects of doing something with such a talented team in Tokyo. We want the Monocle cafe to offer the best tastes and experiences found on our editors’ travels and this means great coffee, cosy classic dishes and excellent desserts,” says Tyler Brûlé, MONOCLE’s editor-in-chief.

The opening of the cafe comes as Monocle also launch their own international 24-hour web radio service, Monocle 24. The service launches live today and features “a pacy mix of current affairs, business, culture and music”.

The Monocle Cafe is located in the Hakyu MEN’S department store, B1 and is open 10am – 11pm.

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The popular Japanese social commerce recycle shop and website Pass The Baton has come up with another great concept of turning the old and used into design desirables. The new idea will see the staff uniforms from Tokyo’s popular cafe Soup Stock, recycled as new t-shirts featuring exclusive designs.

Both Soup Stock and Pass the Baton are the brain child of the Masamichi Toyama, who also runs the neck tie clothes range Giraffe. Pass the Baton works as a kind of vintage flea market, where members can sell there items which they have become attached to but no longer need, putting a note with a story of why they loved the product being sold. Mostly a social web commerce site they also have two stores in the fashionable districts of Omotesando and Marunouchi (both designed by Wonderwall’s Masamichi Katayama).

Toyama is well known for his design and artistic flair having designed all 35 of the Soup Stock cafe interiors himself. The t-shirts, which would normally go to waste as used items, have been redesigned and given a new lease of life by designer Tetsuya Chihara, who has worked on a number of fashion designs in the past. There are 4 different designs to choose form including “Tokyo Borscht”, my personal favourite t-shirt name!

The idea of taking iconic old uniforms and redesigning them into limited edition items is a great idea. This could easily be expanded into other areas such as the delivery companies uniforms or convenience store shirts. Collaborating with famous designers this wouldn’t just be a nice bit of CSR for the companies but actually a decent source of revenue from what would normally just go to waste.

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