Shibuya Fashion
Latest strange fashion look in Shibuya. Cool or scary? 
Shibuya is a well-known, happening downtown area of Tokyo full of amusement spots and shopping outlets popular with the trendy young crowd in their teens and twenties. It is famous, as a place, where new youthful trends are born and then spread nationwide. Center Street, the focal point of activity in Shibuya, swarms with fashion shops, fast food outlets, and game centers. It is crowded day and night with teenagers. The latest look there is known as manba. The trademarks of the manba look are bizarre rouge face-makeup and mostly rose-pink outfits. It is an appearance that somewhat resembles a Halloween costume. The first impression may be scary, but the lasting impact is that of cute comic-like caricatures.
Evolution from ganguro to manba
To understand the manba trend, we need to go back to 1998 when the ganguro look hit the Shibuya scene. Ganguro is a combination of the word gan or face and kuro that means black. This look was a strictly female phenomenon among 15- to 20-year-old girls. They sported bay-colored hair, dressed in micro-mini skirts, worn platform boots, and went to tanning salons to toast their skin to a golden brown color. Ganguro girls' personalities were characterized by self-assertiveness, self-confidence, and antisocial personality. This style went out of fashion in 2000.
Manba and Center guys the focus of attention in Shibuya
A twist on the ganguro look hit the scene in Shibuya last year. The style was dubbed mamba, a play on the word yamaba, itself a humorously derisive term meaning "mountain hag." Today's manba prefer deep-tanned skin, like their ganguro predecessors, but have added distinctive hairstyles, face makeup, and clothing. There's more to it than just the girls' appearance, though. It turns out that manba have spawned a male counterpart, the so-called Center Guys. Center guys are almost exact copies of their female pals. Both favor bushy white, orange, or pink hair and prefer to wear clothing put out under the Alba Rosa fashion label. Faces are decked out with white eye makeup and lipstick and stickers with designs, such as flowers, hearts and stars.
Mild Manba replace the strident, earlier Ganguro phenomenon
In contrast to the rebellious ganguro, the youth involved in the manba trend have gained the general acceptance of society. With their weaknesses for the color pink, cute things, and cats, the mamba crowd has charmed the general Japanese population.
The earlier phenomenon of the ganguro style came in the late 1990's, a time when the Japanese economy was undergoing turbulent change. Japan's long-standing principles of seniority promotion system and lifelong employment contracts were giving way under pressure from the bursting of the earlier economic bubble in land and securities prices. The ganguro style represents a strident, but defused complaint about the status quo. On the other hand, today's mamba style seems to reflect a desire to escape from the pressures of economic life and to simply live life without worrying about plans and the future. As with all such fads, it is just a matter of time before the mamba give way to another trendy fad. If we could only read the minds of the youngsters walking the fashionable streets of Shibuya......
