Fresh Fruits

Presented in an identical format to Phaidon’s previous Fruits, published in 2001, Fresh Fruits is a collection of Tokyo teenage street fashion portraits selected from Japan’s premier street fanzine of the same title. Published every month by Shoichi Aoki, who is also the sole photographer for the magazine, Fruits was established in 1994 as a project to document the growing explosion in street fashion within the suburbs of Tokyo. Over the last decade the magazine has grown to cult status and is now avidly followed by thousands of Japanese teenagers who also use the magazine as an opportunity to check out the latest styles and trends. The average age of those kids featured in the magazine is between 12 and 18 years old. Most of the clothes that they wear are a combination of high fashion – Vivienne Westwood is a keen favourite – and homemade ensembles which when combined together create a novel if not hysterical combination. This latest publication of the best of Fruits will follow the original Phaidon publication by including translations of the various Japanese captions that were originally attached to the photographs that list the name, age and clothing of each person photographed.