Qtiewhale

As I decided to focus on the documentation of individuals personal style in Indonesia, I tried to observe some books and websites that focus on doing street style.

1. FRUiTS and STREET

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Made by Shoichi Aoki, both FRUiTS and STREET are one of the best street style documentation. FRUiTS is also the first magazine that spread the Harajuku street style crazed. Unlike the newer publication, FRUiTS purely filled with pictures with no interviews. It focused on capturing the style and details of individuals in Tokyo (FRUiTS) and London (STREET). I also think that these two cities have the strongest street style.

2. NYLON STREET

NYLON did this book in 2006. It’s focusing on several cities: London, Copenhagen, Berlin, Paris, New York, Melbourne, and Tokyo. The format is still the same with other street styles, but as a magazine, NYLON added the photos with the individuals’ name, age, and several casual questions.

3. DROP Tokyo

Out of all the examples, DROP Tokyo has the hugest base community as it is not only in Tokyo, but also Kansai, New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Korea, Taiwan, and–to my surprise!–Bangkok and Vietnam (on Instagram). South-East Asian country–except for Bangkok probably–are being looked halfway when it comes to fashion. So this is a positive sign. Created in 2007, Drop Tokyo has been the first fashion forum that discovers the “faces” that symbolize Tokyo’s next-generation streets.

4. Tokyo Fashion

From all these examples, I think Tokyo Fashion is the closest to what I want to do. They snap street style but also create articles and guides for experiencing fashion in Tokyo (though the last one is written in 2018. This struck me: do people don’t care about these article/interview or it’s just not the content needed or they just simply not able to do it anymore (as from what I see, they’re talking more about release of collections, and other information on brands that probably is faster to know from the designers/brands itself)? And I understand for street style you can’t take too much time of the person). But it’s fun to see that they linked their snaps with brands that they wear and their music preferences.

Tokyo Fashion solely focuses on Japan (Harajuku, Shibuya, Shinjuku & others). Its gallery is less crowded than Drop Tokyo, might be because they have less to cover.

Another thing that I like about Tokyo Fashion is they’re documenting fashion moments and interviewing people on the streets more intimately (though, again, the last video is from 2018). But from the videos, I’ve seen positive responses about the individuals.

5. @jogjastreetstyle

The only platform in Indonesia in this list and probably the only one. Well, we also have @lookbookindonesia and @ootdindo (inactive since 2018) but they collected photos from users and not taking it themselves. Also, the style that gets represented is similar to each other and they tend to favour influencers. So I don’t think they’re the right platform to look into. On the other hand, @jogjastreetstyle is more diverse and raw. I found this while desperately looking for Indonesian street style and turned out the owners and I followed each other on Instagram. I got the chance to talk and hear about its creation and the impact @jogjastreetstyle has in Jogjakarta.

A lot of people messaged them saying they’re grateful that the account exists as it encouraged them to be braver on expressing personal style. A lot of street style accounts emerged after the success of @jogjastreetstyle. They got covered by media and did an exhibition in 2016 by showcasing photographs of individuals chosen with their stories. The interesting factors (like how someone looks like a hardcore punk on the outside but actually a Sufi and gave a speech once a week–was off the record tho). But this twist makes it interesting–you can not always judge a person based on their appearances–there are a lot of factors that influenced their decisions. This is what I want to convey with GILIGILI. I feel so grateful that Tita (one of the two owners of @jogjastreetstyle) was very open on the experiences and provided me with a lot of insights.

One more thing, on their account @jogjastreetstyle, wrote not literally on the street–which means this condition not only happen in Jakarta–even in Jogja people don’t have the street to express themselves. But they named it street style otherwise since after doing some research, they found that street style itself is the spirit and it doesn’t have to be on the street.

Also, I’m interested in this one essay I read by Luvaas B about street style in Indonesia. When he came and tried to do street style in Jakarta and Bandung (see the essay here), he was bedazzled by how the ‘street’ is indoors and it is hard to get ‘cool’ people with ‘style’. He felt that his style radar (that built up taking street style in the US) flawed.

While the concept of ‘cool’ probably differ across the border, the reason why he felt that his style radar flawed in Indonesia because he looked at the wrong place. If, as quoted from the essay, street style is documentation of exceptional style which ‘superadded, rare, desired quality’ (Johnson-Woods and Karaminas 2013: 13), that applies to probably no more than one in a hundred people, then the ‘cool’ people must be a niche population in Indonesia.

As street style is an unfamiliar concept, people did not practice it and to find those who are ‘cool’ and have ‘style’, I think Luvas lacks the knowledge of the community on where to find the right folk to interview and the right place to conduct his experiment. I think this is the clear gap that I can fill in, as I’m an Indonesian and I belong in the community. I believe I’d be able to find the right places and the right people by networking and connecting between circles starting from my own.

Besides all the above, a lot of different documentations like Korean @streetper or a very niche @thats_so_csm. Or a more non-fashion like @shanghaiobserved and one of my personal favourite @humansofny. I think it would be nice if I can help people to open up and share stories like @humansofny does.

All in all, I can see that narrative is still something that is missing for fashion. Documentation like this is good for the sake of documenting it as inspo and anthropology. But I want to connect fashion with narratives–with stories of the wearer. Why they chose to wear what they wear today? How did the style evolve before it got to its present time? I wanted to create an open environment for people to express themselves and to share their stories so the readers will understand their decision making better. To understand people and remove judgement/prejudices.

I interviewed 29 people that fall into my target audience category (male and female, 18–30 years old, live in big cities, and interested in fashion) for my primary research. I did it all together with the interview about the COVID-19 pandemic. But for this one, I want to know their stories of self-expression from the first time until now. The questions are:

1. Is it hard to express yourself through fashion within your environment?
2. What do you think about the representation (beauty ideal, body image, style preferences) by media and brands in Indonesia? Are they diverse enough?
3. If you ask the question to yourself–do you feel represented by media/brands in Indonesia?
4. What kind of content that you’re engaged the most? Where do you consume these contents?
5. What kind of content you’re hoping to see on self-expression? (no content like that or there are some and you wish to see more of them)

These are basic questions–I’ll adds more questions according to their answers. These questions aim to know their stories, the environment, what type of media and social channels that they use to further prove what I’m going to make.

Some of the evidence I can show (some people didn’t want to be recorded and some wanted to do voice call instead):

Notes taken from the interview (mixed with the dressing up during pandemic interview written half and half in Bahasa and English):

From the interviews, there are some points to highlight:

1. Rising demand for diversity. It is starting to be more diverse now, but some people still feel like brands are just jumping on the diversity bandwagon or doing a gimmick. They want to see if this will lasts.
2. No media focusing on the topic too–though some discussing it through other issues (e.g. femininity and gender), somewhat it’s always only the tip of the iceberg.
3. In Indonesia, the beauty ideal is fair skin, long-haired, and you’ll get plus points if you’re caucasian looking–or half Indonesian. A lot of caucasian models gracing brand catalogues, even for celebrity and influencers, the one that always put in the spotlight are these type of girls. In reality, women in Indonesia have a darker complexion. For men, the beauty ideal is not really a problem, but they have a problem with body image–as the men represented and loved most is the alpha male, masculine type with the slim, fit muscle-y body. None of the movies or tv series shows a bigger, chubby build as the main protagonist. And women have been struggling with this body type problem too. For people aged 19–64 years old in Indonesia, the average height for men is 168 cm and women 159 cm. But media, brands, and designers are using tall models that don’t represent the real people. Some said that it’s hard to get the right size for their body types and the shape of the clothes don’t look as good when it’s worn on their body.
4. Especially to the queer community, as a Muslim majority country, it’s been hard for them to express themselves, especially within their families.
5. The Muslim women who wear hijab are not all adhering to the ‘standard’ modest wear. And these type of hijabers wanted to see more contemporary hijab fashion editorial.
6. For people who are commuting with public transportation, they tend to tone down (not wearing anything flashy and jewellery) and cover themselves because they don’t feel secure being the centre of attention (infrastructure problem). Most of them are also toning their style down to respect their environment (especially family and workplace) and they want to avoid hearing negative reactions or remarks (they usually experienced it before).
7. The media or brands usually expose certain groups of influencers or celebrities and not ‘real people’. Some even said that they don’t trust influencers as much anymore since they’re getting paid to say what they say.
8. Majority of people said that now they know where and with who they can feel safe, and they realised if they just ignore what people say, their environment will get used to what they wear and it will be more comfortable. Even though some comments still come out once in a while, they just brushed it off.
9. Most of them look up to brands and icons from outside of Indonesia because they feel more connected with the style from outside of the country–this also made me realize that Indonesia doesn’t have “style icons”. Almost all of my interviewees chosen foreign people/brands or the more contemporary and edgy brands (like @dibbaofficial, @aestheticpleasure_, @calliecotton). We have some fashion influencers, but like I said they have similar styles (probably because they got endorsed by the same brands too) and just like a theory I found before, these influencers create a certain standard, where followers copy the influencers’ ideals in hope to conform with the current social norm (Brucculieri, 2018), resulted in creating a homogenized expression of self. People think the ones with the most followers are the ‘attractive’ ones, while I think people should know there are different styles out there and I want them to dress and express themselves, not to just copy influencers.
10. They usually search for people or brands (so the flow is either they follow the people then see what brands they’re wearing or they resonate with a certain brand and look for who’s wearing it).
11. They want to see content on real people that they can relate to in terms of style. They want to know more about how (how to style, how-to DIY tie-dye your shirt, how to deconstruct your clothes, etc) and why they wear something. Types of content that offer how outside of fashion (e.g. cooking and gardening) are also the ones that they engaged with the most. The channels are Instagram (saved feature), Youtube, TikTok (for the younger ones, 19–22 years old in this case), and Pinterest (mainly for inspo).
12. Most of the interviewees are familiar with Instagram filter, and they played with quizzes and background filters. I think it’ll be a good engagement for the brand if we can do a collaboration with artists to create that kind of filters as well. (Especially for artists who can’t make their own filters) so we can help them and get the engagement also from their followers.
13. From this interview, I decided to erase the nonconformist from my research questions, as people that I perceived as conformist or a conformist also have the drive to be a nonconformist as well, or doing it very subtly (like a friend of mine wearing the clothes that is the norm for her workplace but she adds polka dot patterns that are very her, or another friend wears flowery/patterned socks just to add the ‘me’ factor when she gets to work).