My Way Your Way

Self-Expression through Fashion

vol.3

Bringing Seifuku to the World!

Aiura Takayuki
President, CONOMi

2012.11

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Profile: Aiura Takayuki President, CONOMi

After taking over his mother's clothing store in the city of Myoko, Niigata prefecture, Mr. Aiura made a splash by marketing nanchatte seifuku. In 2008, he opened a store in Tokyo's Harajuku district and launched his own brand. He continues to attract attention not only in Japan but overseas as well, showing his work at seifuku fashion shows as far and wide as France (Paris), Italy (Rome), Brazil, China, and South Korea.

The term nanchatte seifuku describes a type of standard outfit based on girls' school uniforms but with various style adaptations. Many high school girls whose schools have no required uniform choose to go to school in nanchatte seifuku rather than in their regular casual clothes.

Japanese high school students in the 1960s rebelled against the school system, and one of their demands was for the abolition of uniforms; they wanted more freedom in choosing what to wear to school. As a result, many schools did indeed do away with school uniforms.

Mr. Aiura, regarded as one of the main instigators of the recent nanchatte seifuku boom, tells us that in his high school days he was among those calling for the abolition of school uniforms. So why is he now making uniforms?


Nanchatte Seifuku as Symbol of Freedom

I think it was around the year 2000. A local high school girl and her mother came into the clothing store I run in a small town in Niigata prefecture. The girl told me that even though her school had done away with uniforms, she still wanted to wear a uniform to school.

The school happened to be my own alma mater. When I was a student there, I was constantly calling on the school to loosen the school uniform rules. Particularly for girls, there were all kinds of finicky regulations about uniforms--the skirt had to cover the knees, the jacket had to be a certain length, and so on. I used to wear a kind of remodeled uniform with baggy pants and a shortened jacket, which invariably landed me in trouble with the teachers. I couldn't see why the clothes we wore to school had to be so strictly regulated. To me, a school uniform was like a straitjacket.

Five or six years later, the school abolished uniforms. And yet, here in my shop was a student who wanted to wear one. I couldn't figure out why. "You're lucky to be able to wear whatever you like to school," I told her. "In our day, my friends and I would've loved to be able to wear our own fashions to school, but we weren't allowed to."

But she was adamant that she wanted to wear a uniform. I was quite taken aback. We ended up chatting for an hour or two, and as we talked I gradually came to understand where she was coming from.

The right school uniform can really bring out a high school girl's attractive features. And if it's a "uniform" that she herself has picked out and arranged, then it's not at all a form of constraint or control.

Listening to this young woman explain her craving for a pretty uniform of her own choosing, I felt a fire ignite inside me. Right, I thought, if that's what she wants, then my job is to give it to her. I ended up making her a pleated skirt with a deep-red plaid. She chose the fabric, and I created a pattern tailored to her measurements and made the skirt according to her instructions, including about the height of the hemline.

That was the start of my journey into the world of nanchatte seifuku. That young woman began bringing her friends to the store, and the trend spread from there.

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©TJF

The CONOMi store in Harajuku is on Takeshita-dori (Takeshita Street), a mecca for teen shoppers in Tokyo.


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