Women Wearing the Wind: Fashion Models and the Disconnection of Value (ca. 1970)

Women Wearing the Wind: Fashion Models and the Disconnection of Value (ca. 1970)

Around 1970, a new wind began to blow through the streets of Japan. Young women in mini-skirts, boots, and clear eyeliner strode the streets, and train station posters and magazine pages were filled with models who were not only beautiful, but who also carried a somewhat rebellious fragrance. Fashion models were no longer just a complement to the clothes they wore. They had become the embodiment of the aesthetic sense of the era itself.

Young models such as Reiko Aso were in the midst of this culture. In one issue of a magazine, she casually quipped, "I don't know who Hanamori Yasuji is. This was not mere ignorance, but rather a conscious line drawing. Hanamori was the editor-in-chief of "Kurashi no Techo," a magazine that preached postwar ethics and lifestyle. His stance of eliminating advertisements and upholding sensible living represented the "virtue of modesty" in postwar Japan. For Reiko Aso, however, it was already a relic of the past. Her words reveal a new value system that affirms consumption and expression.

In Japan at this turning point, models did not merely represent trends, but presented a new image of women themselves. Take Sayoko Yamaguchi, for example. When she appeared in the Paris collections in the mid-1970s, her oriental, inorganic beauty shocked the world. Her black hair was cropped and her gaze was expressionless. Her presence, which treated the body itself as if it were art, fundamentally changed the image of the "Japanese woman. On the eve of Yamaguchi's appearance, Reiko Aso and her colleagues were laying the groundwork for this "sensitivity toward the world.

Around the same time, Tsunanakimiki, who appeared in posters for Shiseido, was also shaking the boundaries between advertising and art. Rather than simply selling a product, she visualized the sensibility of the times by imbuing her poses and her gaze with the "smell of the city" and the "emptiness of modernism. When "anan" magazine was launched and its pages were decorated with Parisian-inspired models, readers began to discover themselves anew as "women" rather than "housewives.

One must not forget Yoko Kirishima. Although she was not a fashion model, her lifestyle, style, and way of life were described as "model-like. Her essays on her own lifestyle, and her presence as an independent woman who traveled the world and raised children, presented a "model for living" that was decidedly different from the conventional "good wife and wise mother.

In this context, the ethic of life advocated by Hanamori Yasuharu was, in a sense, "too right" for the women of the new era. A purity of life devoid of advertisements. An eye suspicious of consumption. A gaze that looks at the unknown consumer. These were now beginning to sound somewhat old-fashioned in the face of magazines and models aiming for Milan and Paris.

Reiko Aso's "I don't know" was a word that sharply cut through such shifting values. She began to speak of a new beauty and ethics through indifference. Her silent stance heralded the emergence of a generation that gives significance to "being seen. The fashion model is an entity that speaks not in words but in posture, and in 1970, this quiet revolution was indeed taking place.