The New Yorker has an interesting piece on fashion rebellion and the artificiality of creating the elements of cool among Japanese youth.

In Japan, however, all the skill goes into engineering the scarcity: designers produce only limited editions of T-shirts or jackets, items of the sort that can be easily mass-produced. This means that shopping in Tokyo feels a little like a bizarre parody of grocery shopping in Soviet Russia: you might want to buy a bunch of bananas, but the only thing for sale is pickled cabbage. At the Bathing Ape store just off Takeshita Street, where T-shirts are displayed like prints in an art gallery, sandwiched between sheets of clear plastic, half the display cases are empty, since the company might produce only five hundred of any particular T-shirt design. At certain popular stores, like Silas & Maria, a British skatewear brand, would-be shoppers are required to wait in orderly file in the street, as if they were on a bread line, before being permitted, twenty or so at a time, to rush in and scour the sparsely stocked shelves for any new merchandise. The next twenty customers aren't allowed in until the last of the previous group has left and meticulous sales assistants have restored the shelves and racks to their unmolested condition. The whole cycle can take half an hour or more. This is what Japanese teen-agers do for fun.

The article also attempts to understand certain trends and the psychology behind them. For girls, you can either be a kawaii, cuteness in the form of bears and pigtails and schoolgirl charm; or borrow the ethnicity of the Strong Black Woman; or be a goth of the Asian variety, the Mountain Witch. But these are all poses with one thing in common: the pandering to the men’s rorikon, a loose transliteration of the “Lolita complex.” So whatever fashion reincarnation a girl assumes, she still is the object of a guy’s gaze.