Takashi, the Stylist: Translating Cultural Cool
My phone vibrated, a muffled buzzing on the tatami mat floor of my room in western Tokyo. Flipping open the phone I read the text on the small screen: “You free for a photo shoot? My friend can’t do it. Need another gaijin (foreinger).” The message was from Dan, a French-Canadian university student and skater tightly connected to the Lesque crew. In a subsequent phone call he told me his (white Canadian) friend had been contacted by a fashion stylist for a photo shoot requiring two white skaters as models in support of an unnamed celebrity. Through a sprawling network of skaters involved in the creative industries, the stylist had reached Dan’s friend and asked him if he could recruit another foreign skater—the implication of “foreign” being a white North American. Initially they planned to do the shoot together and when his friend cancelled, Dan contacted me. The stylist had been tasked with a difficult assignment: to source white skaters for the high profile fashion shoot—a difficult commodity to secure on short notice—and one apparently not available on the menus of Tokyo talent agencies. I was excited by the promising ethnographic event involving skateboarding, photography, high profile media, and an already overt intersection of race and body performance but I was under no illusions that I had any unique significance in the arrangements. Dan had called on me to fulfill an obligation to his friend and my third-hand involvement was out of simple expediency. I could skate. I was white. I was probably reliable. Dan lacked any firm details about the shoot other than it was immediate, the crew was under pressure to get it organized quickly, and we had to commit to a whole day.
I had to trust Dan and follow his lead as he relayed information and negotiated a loose schedule. We were agreeing to participate in our own imminent representation by presumably high-profile photographers, editors, and publishers. I assumed he and I shared similar misgivings but our brief phone exchanges expressed a wary enthusiasm for the unexpected while our doubts were muted. The prospect of the shoot was unsettling for me even as it held ethnographic promise: I was recruited into a role where I would perform a version of my own erstwhile ethnographic subject on a media terrain outside of the skateboard world I was studying. Dan and I would be participants and performers in creating a version of our own skateboard culture albeit with little to no control. We were bodies that signified, props that enacted.
Dan had originally coordinated for another friend to join him but last-minute scheduling changes left Dan texting me in the late evening. A few days after the initial text Dan confirmed that we were on for the shoot pending a meeting with the stylist, Takashi. The following Sunday evening we gathered in a small Shinjuku café to discuss the logistics and specifics. We sat close around a small table and awkwardly began our discussion as a dreary rain fell. Takashi began in tentative English by apologizing for his informality thus far for organizing our participation. “I’m sorry too that I am only the stylist. Usually another person has this job…” In unison Dan and I reassured him in Japanese: We were happy to be meeting with him and we didn’t feel at all slighted because someone more senior wasn’t here. Takashi’s face lightened at our response. “You really do speak Japanese! That’s so good! I was made responsible for finding the extra skaters because I speak some English, but I was so worried about how we would do the shoot without a real translator!” Takashi’s mood changed perceptibly as the stress of having to operate as a surrogate translator on top of his primary duties dissipated upon realizing our comfort in Japanese.
Though his initial worries were allayed, ours persisted. We had no idea what kind of terrain or style of skating Takashi and the photographer imagined for their shoot or, given that this was the first time Takashi had actually seen us, if we even had a passable “look.” When we asked this obvious question, Takashi leaned back and laughed briefly before explaining the concept of the shoot in order to answer our question. It quickly became apparent why Takashi was so politely amused at our concern. Our individual attractiveness would hardly matter: the shoot was to feature one of Japan’s hottest heart throbs, Takahiro, the newly anointed lead singer for the enormously popular 14 member pop sensation/boy-band, Exile.
The photo shoot was for the second issue of Exile’s newly launched print platform, a thick, glossy magazine entitled simply 月刊 Exile (Monthly Exile). Takahiro was to model a variety of skateboard and surf fashion following/imitating the style of pioneering 1970’s skateboarders from Santa Monica, L.A. as depicted in the 2005 Hollywood biopic, Lords of Dogtown. Not simply a fashion homage to the revolutionary working class skaters of the Z-Boys team, the shoot was going to recreate key scenes from the movie with Takahiro positioned in the role of Victor Rasuk who in turn played Tony Alva, the most renowned and celebrated skater of the late 70s.
Takashi explained the location was a resort in Chiba Prefecture catering to surfers and overlooking the Pacific, several hours drive from Tokyo. The resort featured a relatively large concrete skatepark imitating those first built on the West Coast in the early 1980s. More importantly it included a replica of a suburban American swimming pool. Blue-painted and tiled backyard pools, emptied because of a major drought in Southern California in the late 70s, became experimental zones skated by Alva and his crew of trespassing, fence-hopping innovators. As such, pools are prominently visible architectural signifiers in the movie and the photographer wanted to feature one in the shoot to closely approximate the iconic setting of the film.
When Takashi described the concept and location a previous concern recurred apart from our appearance. Would our skills satisfy the expectations of the art director and photographer? I looked worriedly at Dan who was nonplussed as I vocalized this potential problem. Everything seemed too uncertain to me and weirdly casual for a shoot running in a national print publication organized around one of Japan’s biggest pop stars. Dan and I were total outsiders with no headshots, resumes, or proof that we could even stand on a skateboard, let alone carve the vertical walls of a bowl. We had only the faintest personal connection to the stylist, who was, after all, press-ganged into rounding up the skaters and not a talent scout or casting supervisor. Takashi’s position was already peculiar, evidenced by his initial nervousness and the simple deflection he offered regarding our skating ability. “If you can stand on a skateboard, that is ok. Maybe just riding around in the park too, but we know you are not pros.” I was quick to assure him I could do more than stand, but honestly, I had never skated a pool and had very little experience on anything like big ramps with vertical walls. Dan too was primarily adept in street skating; neither of us would qualify as “transition skaters,” riders habituated to the physics and body mechanics of “flow” over curved surfaces built to facilitate constant movement from the faces or walls of vertical terrain.
A lot was at stake for Takashi in his decision to use us and I did not want to falsely represent my skating ability. But I was also desperate to be included in the shoot because, my own vanity aside, the idea of the event was so seductively overdetermined as a critical anthropological event. A grand theater was in the making, replete with a layered concept of mimesis entwined with racialized constructs, ready to produce authentic bodies capable of (re)enacting for cameras the embodied gestures of skater identities.
As much as I wanted to be recognized as more than just an ethnographer and validated in my “participant” identity, I wondered how Takashi could calculate our value to the job. The shoot was significant insofar as it involved Exile’s new lead singer at a stage when his transitional media persona was still nascent and being carefully managed. Takashi appeared ill at ease with this responsibility to evaluate the suitability of a supporting cast, a task outside of his normal expertise of wardrobe and accessories. After all, he was used to decorating bodies, not choosing them. If the job of stylist was already part of a precarious stratum of labor, to then be given another responsibility—one marked by the uncertainties of interpretation ethnographers are so exquisitely aware of—must only intensify the risk of Takashi’s position. So why had Takashi been tasked to find the gaijin skater-boy props? What positioned him to be called to work at the embodied cultural borderland?
It was more than Takashi’s basic English abilities that got him this thankless responsibility, though his bilingualism certainly helped. I propose that he possessed another kind of fluency. He was fluent in linguistic and cultural communication that uniquely repositioned him as a stylist with a surplus—an extra potential contingent on capacity—within the context of the job. The surplus allowed Takashi to take on a hybrid role within the shoot, effectively linking different modes of communication together, that of sartorial selection as an exercise in cultural and aesthetic discernment or distinction, and of recruiting foreigners as extras through underground networks. The provisional, improvisational nature of Takashi’s hybrid role and the singularity of this event cohere as defining features of immaterial labor. “Small and sometimes very small ‘productive units’ (often consisting of only one individual) are organized for specific ad hoc projects, and may exist only for the duration of those particular jobs” (Lazzarato 1996, 4). As a stylist, Takashi works to code and decode vocabularies of fashion by assembling and adapting clothes and accessories into a locally decipherable historical and emotional syntax. The stylist operates with oscillating degrees of power, coaxing fashion commodities such as shoes and shirts into an aesthetic palette that holds potent cultural signification in reserve while attending to the demands of advertisers, editors and art directors. In his job, Takashi routinely collaborates with make-up artists, photographers, fashion designers, marketers, and fashion writers and bloggers, all of which integrate themselves into an evolving matrix of labor relations reconfigured for each new and specific assignment. When the immediate group task is done, the present assemblage of workers may reduced to a skeleton crew or dissolved completely, releasing all the atomized specialists back into the anticipating cloud of potential labor.
I had to trust Dan and follow his lead as he relayed information and negotiated a loose schedule. We were agreeing to participate in our own imminent representation by presumably high-profile photographers, editors, and publishers. I assumed he and I shared similar misgivings but our brief phone exchanges expressed a wary enthusiasm for the unexpected while our doubts were muted. The prospect of the shoot was unsettling for me even as it held ethnographic promise: I was recruited into a role where I would perform a version of my own erstwhile ethnographic subject on a media terrain outside of the skateboard world I was studying. Dan and I would be participants and performers in creating a version of our own skateboard culture albeit with little to no control. We were bodies that signified, props that enacted.
Dan had originally coordinated for another friend to join him but last-minute scheduling changes left Dan texting me in the late evening. A few days after the initial text Dan confirmed that we were on for the shoot pending a meeting with the stylist, Takashi. The following Sunday evening we gathered in a small Shinjuku café to discuss the logistics and specifics. We sat close around a small table and awkwardly began our discussion as a dreary rain fell. Takashi began in tentative English by apologizing for his informality thus far for organizing our participation. “I’m sorry too that I am only the stylist. Usually another person has this job…” In unison Dan and I reassured him in Japanese: We were happy to be meeting with him and we didn’t feel at all slighted because someone more senior wasn’t here. Takashi’s face lightened at our response. “You really do speak Japanese! That’s so good! I was made responsible for finding the extra skaters because I speak some English, but I was so worried about how we would do the shoot without a real translator!” Takashi’s mood changed perceptibly as the stress of having to operate as a surrogate translator on top of his primary duties dissipated upon realizing our comfort in Japanese.
Though his initial worries were allayed, ours persisted. We had no idea what kind of terrain or style of skating Takashi and the photographer imagined for their shoot or, given that this was the first time Takashi had actually seen us, if we even had a passable “look.” When we asked this obvious question, Takashi leaned back and laughed briefly before explaining the concept of the shoot in order to answer our question. It quickly became apparent why Takashi was so politely amused at our concern. Our individual attractiveness would hardly matter: the shoot was to feature one of Japan’s hottest heart throbs, Takahiro, the newly anointed lead singer for the enormously popular 14 member pop sensation/boy-band, Exile.
The photo shoot was for the second issue of Exile’s newly launched print platform, a thick, glossy magazine entitled simply 月刊 Exile (Monthly Exile). Takahiro was to model a variety of skateboard and surf fashion following/imitating the style of pioneering 1970’s skateboarders from Santa Monica, L.A. as depicted in the 2005 Hollywood biopic, Lords of Dogtown. Not simply a fashion homage to the revolutionary working class skaters of the Z-Boys team, the shoot was going to recreate key scenes from the movie with Takahiro positioned in the role of Victor Rasuk who in turn played Tony Alva, the most renowned and celebrated skater of the late 70s.
Takashi explained the location was a resort in Chiba Prefecture catering to surfers and overlooking the Pacific, several hours drive from Tokyo. The resort featured a relatively large concrete skatepark imitating those first built on the West Coast in the early 1980s. More importantly it included a replica of a suburban American swimming pool. Blue-painted and tiled backyard pools, emptied because of a major drought in Southern California in the late 70s, became experimental zones skated by Alva and his crew of trespassing, fence-hopping innovators. As such, pools are prominently visible architectural signifiers in the movie and the photographer wanted to feature one in the shoot to closely approximate the iconic setting of the film.
When Takashi described the concept and location a previous concern recurred apart from our appearance. Would our skills satisfy the expectations of the art director and photographer? I looked worriedly at Dan who was nonplussed as I vocalized this potential problem. Everything seemed too uncertain to me and weirdly casual for a shoot running in a national print publication organized around one of Japan’s biggest pop stars. Dan and I were total outsiders with no headshots, resumes, or proof that we could even stand on a skateboard, let alone carve the vertical walls of a bowl. We had only the faintest personal connection to the stylist, who was, after all, press-ganged into rounding up the skaters and not a talent scout or casting supervisor. Takashi’s position was already peculiar, evidenced by his initial nervousness and the simple deflection he offered regarding our skating ability. “If you can stand on a skateboard, that is ok. Maybe just riding around in the park too, but we know you are not pros.” I was quick to assure him I could do more than stand, but honestly, I had never skated a pool and had very little experience on anything like big ramps with vertical walls. Dan too was primarily adept in street skating; neither of us would qualify as “transition skaters,” riders habituated to the physics and body mechanics of “flow” over curved surfaces built to facilitate constant movement from the faces or walls of vertical terrain.
A lot was at stake for Takashi in his decision to use us and I did not want to falsely represent my skating ability. But I was also desperate to be included in the shoot because, my own vanity aside, the idea of the event was so seductively overdetermined as a critical anthropological event. A grand theater was in the making, replete with a layered concept of mimesis entwined with racialized constructs, ready to produce authentic bodies capable of (re)enacting for cameras the embodied gestures of skater identities.
As much as I wanted to be recognized as more than just an ethnographer and validated in my “participant” identity, I wondered how Takashi could calculate our value to the job. The shoot was significant insofar as it involved Exile’s new lead singer at a stage when his transitional media persona was still nascent and being carefully managed. Takashi appeared ill at ease with this responsibility to evaluate the suitability of a supporting cast, a task outside of his normal expertise of wardrobe and accessories. After all, he was used to decorating bodies, not choosing them. If the job of stylist was already part of a precarious stratum of labor, to then be given another responsibility—one marked by the uncertainties of interpretation ethnographers are so exquisitely aware of—must only intensify the risk of Takashi’s position. So why had Takashi been tasked to find the gaijin skater-boy props? What positioned him to be called to work at the embodied cultural borderland?
It was more than Takashi’s basic English abilities that got him this thankless responsibility, though his bilingualism certainly helped. I propose that he possessed another kind of fluency. He was fluent in linguistic and cultural communication that uniquely repositioned him as a stylist with a surplus—an extra potential contingent on capacity—within the context of the job. The surplus allowed Takashi to take on a hybrid role within the shoot, effectively linking different modes of communication together, that of sartorial selection as an exercise in cultural and aesthetic discernment or distinction, and of recruiting foreigners as extras through underground networks. The provisional, improvisational nature of Takashi’s hybrid role and the singularity of this event cohere as defining features of immaterial labor. “Small and sometimes very small ‘productive units’ (often consisting of only one individual) are organized for specific ad hoc projects, and may exist only for the duration of those particular jobs” (Lazzarato 1996, 4). As a stylist, Takashi works to code and decode vocabularies of fashion by assembling and adapting clothes and accessories into a locally decipherable historical and emotional syntax. The stylist operates with oscillating degrees of power, coaxing fashion commodities such as shoes and shirts into an aesthetic palette that holds potent cultural signification in reserve while attending to the demands of advertisers, editors and art directors. In his job, Takashi routinely collaborates with make-up artists, photographers, fashion designers, marketers, and fashion writers and bloggers, all of which integrate themselves into an evolving matrix of labor relations reconfigured for each new and specific assignment. When the immediate group task is done, the present assemblage of workers may reduced to a skeleton crew or dissolved completely, releasing all the atomized specialists back into the anticipating cloud of potential labor.
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