Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
On Oahu and up to my eyeballs in coco-surf, sloppy-flora, roasted-pig chic.
May 14, 2001 | It is noon, mid-February at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach. The sky is hazy and humid, and the clouds intermittently drizzle a noncommittal rain on the determined sunbathers below. It is not an auspicious day for the debut of the spring/summer line of CocoLulu, the Japanese teen clothing company that has chosen the Royal Hawaiian for its fashion show.
A runway has been set up in the hotel courtyard, steps away from the beach, and a passel of lithe Japanese models is gamely maneuvering the catwalk. Synthetic, hyperspeed techno blasts from a fuzzy P.A. system; the music's manufactured beat is designed to send dancers into late-night frenzies, but on this languid Sunday morning it simply grates. The teenage models can't quite keep up with the pace, though they make up for this with exaggerated enthusiasm, swiveling their hips as they traipse down the runway.
Over the P.A. system, an invisible announcer gushes in rapid Japanese before offering a terse English translation. "What about going on a date like this?" she queries, the implicit question mark obliterated by her translation. Two models walk down the runway in headache-inducing outfits. One girl trips along in neon-green platform shoes at least 4 inches high, wearing skintight, candy-colored vinyl pants with a matching vinyl coat. The other wears hot pants (a strange choice for a date in Japan, but hey, that's fashion). In a nod to the ganguro girl look so popular in Japan, their hair is peroxided to a strange brownish-orange hue and coaxed into waves with hairspray, and they both sport fake tans, so that their skin is the same odd hue of their hair. The girls arrive at the end of the runway and vamp, enormous smiles plastered across their faces.
CocoLulu is the Japanese equivalent of Wet Seal; in Asia, it's a popular fashion label and shop that sells cheap and trendy clothes for teenagers. CocoLulu's itsy-bitsy pants and wee tube tops are cut far too small for your average American booty, but the line does boast one store in the United States -- here in Honolulu.
Communiqué
Accessories wanted, dead or alive.
By Carina Chocano
Honolulu, after all, takes as much from Asia as it does from America, and gives back to both. Equidistant from the West Coast of the U.S. and Japan, the city has a transient population that hails from both countries and includes a large number of native Hawaiians. Roughly a third of the 7 million annual visitors are from Japan. Shop signs in Honolulu are as likely to be in Japanese as English, and the presence of the vowel-heavy Hawaiian language (mahalo, haole, malihini) just adds to the sensation that this place is not just one place. Instead, it's an undestination that conflates the best and worst of three cultures.
As America's sole island state, Hawaii is the unfortunate recipient of our collective tropical fantasies. Tourism may have stripped this city of everything that it once symbolized as a tropical destination, but the Japanese and American tourists who flock here still persist in perceiving it as the ultimate island getaway. As a gesture to this, every visitor's first Hawaiian purchase will inevitably be in a hibiscus print, and, as tribute, trendy fashion lines like CocoLulu look to the islands' fluorescent colors and surfer chic and vibrant florals as stylistic inspiration.
But in a sense, the idea of Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, is more potent than the actuality. Oahu hosts more tourists than any other island; although islands like Kauai offer more authentically tranquil paradises, it is still Oahu where tourists go first (and, often, exclusively). The wall-to-wall tourist boutiques hawking schlocky tchotchkes -- dolphin sculptures, T-shirts airbrushed with palm trees, dancing hula girls for your dashboard -- cater to the notion that Honolulu is a gateway to a tropical paradise.
Yet the fantasy of island leisure that the city and its international tourists hope to evoke is more about a notion stuck in the 1950s than the reality of what Honolulu -- a bustling modern city of 800,000 -- is today. It is an exotic vacation destination whose impact on international fashion has unwittingly sent it whirling toward its own aesthetic crisis.
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