Posts Tagged ‘fashion’

Playable Electric Guitar T-Shirt

Musical t-shirts from StrapyaNext are introduced to Japanese TV viewers, and then shown off to foreigners in Japan:

There’s are electric guitar, keyboard, and drum t-shirts, all of which can make sounds. The electronic bits are removable, so the other part of the shirt can be washed.

Most of the foreigners who see the shirts are very impressed. At the end of the clip, the three t-shirt dudes have a jam session with a professional pianist.

After some searching, I found that the shirts are available on Amazon: the Electric Guitar Shirt, Keyboard Shirt, and Drum Shirt are sold for between 20 and 30 dollars, considerably less than the 3,580 yen price shown in the TV report.

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• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• Dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)

Meggings: leggings for men

Apparently leggings for men (“meggings”) are this year’s hit fashion item for Japanese men in their 20′s and 30′s:

The leggings-wearing men who are interviewed say they like meggings, but most women don’t seem to find their choice of clothing to be very manly. Of the 100 women interviewed, only 62 did not think men look cool when they wear leggings.

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• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)

Haircuts around the world

In the process of traveling around the world, NTV’s “Itte Q” forced assistant directors and other staff members to place themselves at the mercy of local barbers:

Each man was given what the barber thought would look best. The results varied greatly, especially since they went to high class hair stylists in some countries and cheap local barbers in others.

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• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)

Odd Japanese fashion

Some video from a national competition for high school fashion design clubs (“the Koshien of fashion”):

241 schools competed, and 40 made it into the final round. In the video clip we can see one girl dressed like a textbook, an anti-nuclear weapons protest dress, a freakish strawberry thing, and a girl who seems to have come straight out of the Derelict fashion line from Zoolander. The winner was a team from Aomori prefecture that created the puzzle outfit seen in the above screen capture.
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• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
• Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan (Subscribe)

Uniqlo to buy the Gap?

Amy Odell of NY Mag reports that Uniqlo owner Tadashi Yanai might buy the Gap:

Yanai is trying to turn Fast Retailing into the biggest clothing manufacturer and retailer in the world. The easiest way for him to do this by targeting the U.S. market is not to open a million new Uniqlo stores — that would be too much of a pain. So he plans to take a shortcut and simply buy a large chain. Insiders speculate that Gap is that chain.

[hat tip to Marxy]

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• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
• Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan (Subscribe)

Police mascot shot by gunman

On a T-shirt. And the police were not happy about it, as this news report shows:

Three men have been charged with trademark infringement for printing and selling the t-shirts back in 2006. The men had failed to obtain permission from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police before using an illustration of their mascot, Pipo-kun.

Although the shirts has originally been sold for 3,150 yen apiece at a store in Shinjuku, but sales were poor and after several price decreases the men actually ended up giving away some of the unsold shirts for free.