Japan is a land of fast-moving fashion trends, and you never know what the next fad will be. One week all the girls in Tokyo might be sporting tops with the British Union Jack and extremely cute “Absolute Zone” socks, and the next they’ll be dressing like pandas and rabbits. This year the trend seems to be for the world of anime to influence mainstream fashion in interesting ways. The new issue of the popular fashion magazine Smart features a cool “photo shoot” of Asuka from Evangelion, lounging around wearing exotic fashions while being “photographed.” It’s part of the Chingcame (chin-kah-may) series of photobooks that were popular a decade or so ago, which featured beautiful pictures of Japanese models wearing fashionable clothing, or no clothing at all. This first-ever 2D version of the Chingcame “photo” series caused a big splash in Japan, and every fan had to buy a copy of the magazine, making it hard for J-List to secure stock for the site (we did get a few issues though). The anime-meets-fashion trend seems to be continuing. There’s a fashion magazine called Mode Evangelion in which Eva girls show off the latest fashions in lieu of photographed models, and Sanae Dekomori from Chu2koi made her debut as a fashion model on the cover of a mainstream magazine for girls.
Asuka makes her fashion debut.
