Ginza magazine
a review + a love letter
One of my favorite things to do in the city is to visit the salon Shizen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I was in desperate need of a haircut and so I stopped by last week to see Junko who is fabulously talented and so cool. Shizen is a gem of a place. Not only do they have an impeccably cool and talented staff but they house an amazing selection of reading material - piles of fashion magazines and literary journals messily lined up against the wall for their clients to casually peruse or in my case rapaciously seize. It's easily something I could get hours lost into so by the time my appointment was ready after a 15-minute wait and Junko called me over, I had about 5 stacks of magazines firmly gripped in each hand as I walked over to the salon chair. My time pouring over all their books proved rewarding as I've now discovered a new Japanese fashion magazine, Ginza, which I've since been captivated by.
“Our world in fashion, though getting bigger in following is getting smaller in perspective”
What is lovely about Ginza is that conceptually it stands wildly different from all other fashion magazines in how it digests and exhibits fashion. For the December issue, the magazine took on the theme of "Cats" and weaved these furry feline creatures to be center feature in all its story lines, editorial spreads, interviews, and articles on culture. It's a strange concept and the topic seems far and irrelevant to the subject of fashion but the magazine so beautifully executes this theme with such originality, the end product is artful and deeply compelling.
The experience of reading through the magazine is strange but it quickly turns delightful - Ginza treats its reader as if she is one human-sized kitty. The clothes don't take center stage but they are an accessory to these fantastical narratives that weave in and out of a cat's perspective. It's a little trippy but so gorgeously done. I studied the issue cover-to-cover several times because the content is fresh and so new and beautiful. I couldn't completely comprehend everything I was looking at. I've just never seen anything like it. Ginza is a bold and daring publication. And thankfully Shizen has introduced me to something fresh.
Our world in fashion, though getting bigger in following is getting smaller in perspective. Most fashion magazines today have been retelling the same story for the past 10 years. The spreads are the same, the runway recaps are the same, the celebrity focused editorials are all the same. With the world becoming smaller in our increasingly digital age, it's not enough to share a photo of a beautiful dress coming down the Paris runway - the door of accessibility once closed in fashion is now wide open. That photo will be shared countless times over on Instagram and then in Vogue, Elle and Harpers Bazaar. Tell me a story with the garment, have it be an imaginative narrative and inject a dose of fantasy - this is what fashion must do, it must persist in the realm of fantasy. Real style is never about the garment, it's about the story of the girl or in this case, the kitty, living in the garment.
“At Ginza I’d like to present fashion as one aspect of the world to women who want to follow the latest happenings in various fields and who have an interest in topics like music, art, film and design.”