Shoichi Aoki is a Japanese photographer and the creator of STREET Magazine, TUNE Magazine and FRUiTS magazine. He also subsequently created the Fruits and Fresh Fruits photo-books as a way of offering his photos to the foreign market.

Shoichi Aoki began documenting street fashion

Street fashion

Street fashion is a term used to describe fashion that is considered to have emerged not from studios, but from the grassroots. Street fashion is generally associated with youth culture, . Japanese street fashion sustains multiple simultaneous highly diverse fashion movements at any given time....

 in Tokyo

Tokyo

, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...

's fashionable Harajuku

Harajuku

Harajuku is the common name for the area around Harajuku Station on the Yamanote Line in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo, Japan....

 area in the mid 1990s when he noticed a marked change in the way young people were dressing. Rather than following European and American trends, people were customising elements of traditional Japanese dress - kimono

Kimono

The is a Japanese traditional garment worn by men, women and children. The word "kimono", which literally means a "thing to wear" , has come to denote these full-length robes...

, obi

Obi (sash)

is a sash for traditional Japanese dress, keikogi worn for Japanese martial arts, and a part of kimono outfits.The obi for men's kimono is rather narrow, wide at most, but a woman's formal obi can be wide and more than long. Nowadays, a woman's wide and decorative obi does not keep the kimono...

 sashes and geta

Geta (footwear)

Geta are a form of traditional Japanese footwear that resemble both clogs and flip-flops. They are a kind of sandal with an elevated wooden base held onto the foot with a fabric thong to keep the foot well above the ground. They are worn with traditional Japanese clothing such as kimono or yukata,...

 sandals - and combining them with handmade, secondhand and alternative designer fashion in an innovative 'DIY' approach to dressing.

In 1997 Shoichi Aoki founded the monthly magazine FRUiTS, now a cult fanzine

Fanzine

A fanzine is a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who share their interest...

with an international following, to record and celebrate the freshness of fashion in Harajuku. All photographs in the exhibition were originally published in FRUiTS.

Both Fruits and Fresh Fruits are collections of Japanese street fashion. An interview with Aoki can be found http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/nightair/stories/s788802.htm here].

Books

• Fruits - Phaidon Press (January 6, 2001) - ISBN-13: 978-0714840833
• Fresh Fruits - Phaidon Press (June 1, 2005) - ISBN-13: 978-0714845104