For many years, parts of the Harajuku area were closed to car traffic on Sundays, increasing foot traffic and making it easier for young people to gather and be seen. This helped turn fashion into a public activity—something performed, photographed, and discussed in real time. The end of these closures later changed how street style circulated and where people gathered.
Laforet Harajuku opened in the Harajuku district and gradually became closely tied to youth-oriented fashion retail. Its dense, multi-level layout helped smaller boutiques and emerging labels sit near one another, encouraging a “scene” rather than isolated stores. This later provided key infrastructure for both Harajuku street style and the nearby backstreet Ura-Harajuku movement.
Hiroshi Fujiwara founded the label GOODENOUGH, an early landmark in Japanese streetwear. His work helped connect Japanese youth fashion to international influences like hip-hop and imported casualwear, while keeping production and distribution relatively small. This approach shaped later Ura-Harajuku ideas about scarcity, community, and “insider” taste.
Jun Takahashi founded UNDERCOVER while studying apparel design at Bunka Fashion College. The brand mixed street fashion with music and subculture references, helping define a look “between street and high fashion.” This became a foundation for Ura-Harajuku’s reputation for experimental design rather than simple sportswear basics.
NIGO and Jun Takahashi opened the NOWHERE store in the backstreets of Harajuku (Ura-Harajuku). The shop became a shared platform where early BAPE and UNDERCOVER were sold in the same space, strengthening the sense of a connected local network. NOWHERE helped define a model where a small store could drive culture through curation, limited supply, and word-of-mouth.
NIGO founded A Bathing Ape (BAPE) in Ura-Harajuku, building a brand that treated T-shirts, hoodies, and accessories as collectible objects. Limited releases and a recognizable visual identity helped create queues, resale behavior, and strong brand loyalty. These practices became a core part of how Ura-Harajuku influenced global streetwear business models.
The toy shop BOUNTY HUNTER opened in Harajuku and began selling original toys and apparel alongside imported vintage items. Its mix of punk, collectibles, and fashion showed how Harajuku retail often blended lifestyle “hobbies” with clothing. This helped widen Ura-Harajuku beyond apparel-only labels into a broader street culture economy.
WTAPS was founded by Tetsu Nishiyama (TET) and became known for military-inspired, utilitarian streetwear. Along with other local labels, it added depth and stylistic range to the Ura-Harajuku scene, moving it beyond a single “look.” The growing cluster of brands made Harajuku’s backstreets a destination for specialized shopping and style identity.
Shoichi Aoki founded the monthly street fashion magazine FRUiTS, with its first issue dated June 1997. The magazine’s street-snap format helped translate local Harajuku outfits into a widely shared visual record. This documentation made Harajuku and Ura-Harajuku style legible to readers outside Tokyo and helped preserve the era’s rapidly changing subcultures.
By 1998, the period described as Sunday pedestrian closures in the Harajuku shopping district had ended. As street gathering conditions changed, visibility shifted toward magazines, boutiques, and branded destinations rather than large public congregations. This helped push Harajuku fashion further into retail channels—supporting Ura-Harajuku’s shop-centered culture.
Mana founded Moi-même-Moitié, a label closely associated with Gothic Lolita (a darker, Victorian-influenced branch of Lolita fashion). The brand connected street fashion to music scenes such as visual kei, giving Lolita styles clearer iconography and reference points. This helped Harajuku fashion movements in the late 1990s and early 2000s become easier to identify and spread.
Ganguro—an alternative style involving tanned skin, light hair, and bold makeup—peaked around the year 2000. Although centered in places like Shibuya and Ikebukuro, it circulated alongside Harajuku styles in magazines and youth culture. The contrast between highly styled “kawaii” looks and more rebellious beauty trends helped define Japan’s broader late-1990s/early-2000s fashion landscape.
Novala Takemoto’s Kamikaze Girls was published in 2002 and centered a Lolita protagonist, bringing the style into a widely read narrative. By presenting Lolita as a detailed personal world—brands, aesthetics, and values—the story helped explain the subculture to people outside Harajuku. This supported a shift from local street trend to recognizable national (and later international) reference.
The live-action film adaptation of Kamikaze Girls was released in May 2004, turning the story’s Lolita-and-yankii contrast into widely shareable visuals. Film distribution helped Harajuku-related styles travel internationally alongside music, magazines, and early internet sharing. By the mid-2000s, Harajuku fashion was increasingly understood as a set of distinct sub-styles rather than a single trend.
BAPE opened its New York City store in SoHo in 2005, bringing the Ura-Harajuku approach—limited items, strong graphics, and store-as-destination—to a major global market. This made Japanese streetwear more directly accessible to U.S. consumers and helped normalize “drops” and line culture outside Japan. The move marked a clear transition from local backstreets to international flagship retail.
By the late 2000s, Ura-Harajuku’s reputation attracted larger brands and heavier tourism, shifting the area away from its earlier “hidden” boutique character. As more of the style system moved into mainstream retail, the original scene’s exclusivity became harder to maintain. This period is often treated as the end of Ura-Harajuku’s formative phase, even as its ideas continued globally.
Harajuku to Ura-Harajuku fashion movements (1990–2010)