Woo! Lolita Snap will stay open.

Let us applaud the crazy girls in Tokyo wearing demented maid costumes and late 18th century lace contraptions, for they have pulled off the greatest media coup in Japanese history! These are girls from the lowest-rung on the high school ladder - even beneath the college-bound bookworms - and they've convinced the world that their nerdy deviance is what's cool in Japan! And how could someone not want to visit a country so ridiculous that the young women dress up in doll clothes and Broadway makeup in the depths of summer!

Meanwhile, society's prom queens and sorority sisters - the Can Cam girls - silently rule the school and win new recruits to their female order by the minute. They are the everyday office lady, the big sister, the bank teller off at five-thirty, the good girl who likes to go bad on the weekends - long, slightly-curled brown hair extending four inches beyond the shoulders, white pants or denim skirt, Louis Vuitton or Gucci bags or at least a LV dayplanner, high-heeled sandals, painted nails, shiny lips, immaculate. They are, for all practical purposes, the real Japan.


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Uh, neomarxy, everyone knows that prom queens and sorority sisters aren't 'cool'. New fashions always start on the 'lower rungs of the high school ladder' and then blossom and are accepted. Do you think that the prom queens of say, 1984 were wearing hip hop gear? But now they are all wearing it. Many other fashions from pseudo punk to boho have come from marginalized subcultures, and up into the mainstream. Of course, in America, you can't follow fashion from magazines- usually by the time it gets into one- it's pretty much over.