Tokyo, Japan undoubtedly serves as one of the fashion capitols of the world by notoriously setting fashion trends that gravitates and attracts the global audience. The ever evolving fashion consciousness plays an important influence in lifestyle trends that evidently dominate the lifestyles of many young Japanese people, particularly teenage girls of urban settings such as Tokyo.
In a growing media culture praising the motto of “appearance is everything,” the light-skin look is valued more highly over dark-skinned individuals in Japanese culture. In experimentation with fashion trends, Japanese women are beginning to adopt this new lifestyle trend that has definitely raised a few eyebrows and instilled pride among the “American Hip-Hop” community, which are predominantly African American dominated and led.
Notably, Eastern civilization is a bit more accepting to change and trends, where discrimination is not so much based on skin color and culture, as it is in Western civilization. So Japanese women say, why not experiment with other cultural trends in the world? Why limit ourselves to our own particular cultural style? This new shift in fashion adoption tells us we are heading towards a more global culture.
B-Style (short for Black Lifestyle) is a trend that defies the conventional perspective of a glorified light-skinned Japanese look by dedication to looking more “blackâ€. Japanese women are increasingly taking weekly trips to the tanning salons in pursuit of this style – celebrating and embracing a foreign culture. Since prejudice in Japan is not focused so much on race, but on Japanese versus foreigners, this is a beautiful thing since it is not intended to be a racial reference against the Black community at all, if anything it is in glorification and appreciation for something of value and worth. In paradox and reciprocity of appreciation, African American women here are known to straighten out their hair and bleach their skin light to inherit Western society’s cultural ideology of “beauty.” But obviously, as we can see here, there are different forms of beauty.
Metropolis Web TV spotlights a young teenage girl from Tokyo, Hina, who is the archetype of the newly popular trend of B-Style:
