Livejournal, FRUiTS,
and how I fell in love with fashion
craving foodWhenever I feel uninspired by fashion (a despair I’ve frequently fallen into since COVID), I always try to return to where it all started for me.
It's easy for me to remember exactly how I fell in love with fashion: my sister and I joined Livejournal for the anime community, and ended up in the FRUiTS community and its offshoots. We spent hours browsing streetstyle and editorial scans (in communities like foto_decadent), filling megabytes of harddrive space with pictures we found inspiring.
If you aren’t familiar with FRUiTS, it was a Japanese street style magazine that ran for twenty years, between 1997 and 2017. The FRUiTS format was a photo with a survey of all the items a person was wearing. It may seem like an evident format for street style, ubiquitous now among bloggers and influencers, but it was revolutionary back then. The idea of posting photos of everyday people, and then tagging their brands (be it Vivienne Westwood, Hysteric Glamour, or even vintage) was completely revolutionary. This was, after all, years before blogs like the Sartorialist and Garance Doré began cataloguing candid style.
| Some of my favorite FRUiTS looks. Click thumbnails to enlarge. | |
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FRUiTS did not adhere to any particular style – though it’s often just generalized as Harajuku style – but the effect might be summarized as layered, playful, mix and match, avant-garde. Browsing through old FRUiTS scans (I still have all of my sister and my old magazines, too) is still exciting today – the looks are just as relevant, imaginative, and exciting as ever.
| Scans from fruits_magazine_archives on Instagram | |
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fruits_magazine_archives on Instagram is an incredible website with over 1,200 FRUiTS scans, listing the issue number and years of all of the photos. Replete with colorful, creative outfits, browsing this site is a very cheerful reminder of dressing up and going out in the before-COVID-times.
