How gyaru turned brown hair and loose socks into a Japanese rebellion
In a country that prized pale skin, dark hair and a future as a housewife, gyaru girls dyed their hair brown, tanned deeply and piled on makeup. Critics called it racy and delinquent. Decades later the Foreign Ministry was promoting kogal style abroad as a Japanese brand, alongside Lolita fashion.
The word is a Japanese borrowing of the English slang gal. When it arrived in the 1970s it simply meant a lively young woman, and one unconfirmed story credits its spread partly to a line of women's jeans Wrangler called Gals in 1972. Kenji Sawada had a hit with a song called OH! Gal in 1979. At the height of the bubble economy in the late 1980s, college students and office workers wearing tight bodycon dresses were the gals of the day.
The bubble's collapse changed who led the trend. From 1992 to 1993, high school girls in uniforms with short skirts and slouchy loose socks caught the media's eye, and by 1993 the older office-lady boom was finished. The singer Namie Amuro inspired imitators whose look was dubbed Amuraa, and she is often credited with making brown-dyed hair fashionable. Surfer and Los Angeles styles joined the mix. Shibuya, where stores such as 109 and PARCO turned toward teenage shoppers, became the district for teen fashion.
This was the kogal era. One popular theory holds that the label first marked out high schoolers barred from nightclubs, distinguishing them from adult women; weekly magazines and TV specials ran kogal features constantly, alongside moral panics about young people's values. There was even a male counterpart, the gyaruo. Across town in cheaper Harajuku, Gothic Lolita fashion emerged from around 1998 as a deliberate opposite to gyaru ideals.
Heisei-era gyaru, lasting through 2019, meant heavy makeup, deep tans, bleached hair and sharply defined substyles. The current revival in the Reiwa era is looser. It prizes individual expression over strict rules, mixing bold or minimal looks with influences such as Y2K, jirai-kei, onee-kei and plain street wear.
Source: Gyaru
