Challenging Fashion Advertising - A Collection of Laforet Harajuku Ads
Since 1978, the Laforet retail complex has become a hub for Harajuku fashion aficionados.
Home of fashion movements like Lolita fashion, luxury brands such as Vivienne Westwood, and streetwear brands like X-Girl.
However, its growth and relevance would not have been possible if not for its challenging and innovative advertising campaigns, especially during the 90s and early 00s.
In 1990, after a decade of instability, Laforet Harajuku hired advertising mastermind, Takuya Ōnuki, as an art director for its marketing. Ōnuki, true to his style of shock advertising, began to change the face of Laforet from the very first campaign, which was undergoing a complete makeover both physically and conceptually.
Unlike conventional fashion industry advertising, focused on brands and models, Ōnuki's advertising focused on playful, quirky, nonliteral, even trashy concepts that openly tried to challenge the audience’s mind.
Examples of these guerrilla campaigns were NUDE OR LAFORET [1997], which left people in their underwear in different American locations, and THE GIANT BRA [2001], in which they dropped a real giant bra in the middle of Los Angeles.
Other ads had no apparent meaning other than to express abstract images. The goal was to get rid of any extra content and to just make people say: "Oh, it's Laforet!". Ōnuki called this "functional beauty."
He wasn't the only one behind Laforet Harajuku’s advertising. Hideyuki Tanaka collaborated on THE GIANT BRA campaign, and Katsunori Aoki was the artistic director of several ones in which Ichiro Tanida provided his signature 3D graphic design, such as Bazaar Fighter and Bazaar Grand Prix [1996].
In the early 00's, Nagi Noda was in charge of taking the brand into the new millennium with campaigns such as Animal Girl [2004] and a series of ads based on the book Little Women [2000] that, while it still defied the ordinary, emphasized a playful yet distinctive and sophisticated image.
After more than 30 years since its first appearance, Laforet Harajuku’s ads of the time are still one of the most interesting examples of pushing fashion marketing forward.
