Hysteric Glamour is a Japanese designer label created by Nobuhiko 'Nobu' Kitamura in 1984.
Kitamura decided to pursue a career in fashion, graduating in 1984 and landing a part-time job at Ozone Community, a youth-oriented label that was cresting as Japanese fashion veered more towards more directional silhouettes. The predominant preppy-inspired style of the early 80s was being subverted by the all-black clad Crow tribes and new wave and punk heavily influenced the new wave trend. Japanese teens began to assert themselves more through clothing, deviating from the clean-cut norm and adopting the style of subcultural figures from the West and homegrown rock stars like The Checkers and Seiko Matsuda.
When he was 22, Kitamura couldn’t find a full-time job, so continued to work at Ozone Community, who encouraged him to launch his own unisex label. Calling the brand Hysteric Glamour, the brand got big in Japan when it got on the radar of the editors at Olive, a highly-influential Japanese women’s magazine that heavily influenced the Harajuku girls of the 80s. It just so happened that the anti-fashion leanings of Hysteric Glamour—more informed by rock-and-roll rebellion than breaking tailoring traditions—fell in line with what consumers were getting hungrier for at the time. It was counter-cultural streetwear long before the term came to characterize a movement of graphic-driven hoodies, t-shirts, and baseball caps.
Hysteric Glamour’s graphic direction draws the line between mass, obscure, and obscene. 70s pornography is a big reference, as are anti-establishment punk slogans, indie comic books, psychedelia, and skulls. Musically, the well he draws from is pretty obvious to anyone who’s witnessed the evolution of punk from subversive political tool to superfluous edgy design trope. Streetwear heads will recognize the way Hysteric Glamour readily reinterprets surplus and biker staples like M-65 jackets and asymmetrical-zip leather jackets with aggressive iconography.
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