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Egg Magazine
From Virtual Japan
Egg Magazine is a Japanese fashion magazine focused on gyaru style. The magazine, which features photographs of ganguro girls, with their interests and newest trends, has become popular for its take on a specific subset of Japanese street culture, much in the same way Fruits did before it.
Contents |
About Egg Magazine
Published by Taiyo Group, Egg Magazine is a monthly publication focusing specifically on Gyaru fashion, or women’s street fashion in Tokyo. The magazine has been published since the 1980s when the fashion first came into style and has since evolved repeatedly to match the ebb and flow of the fashions that it reports on. Egg uses its own models for its shoots, though occasionally has a guest model who has become famous in television or music and exemplifies the gyaru fashion trend.
Mens Egg is a recent addition to the magazine brand and has become bigger as a similar subset of men’s fashion has arisen in Tokyo streets. However most fashion present in the Mens Egg issues is less overt than its female counterpart, featuring sleeker hybrids of men’s fashions.
Magazine Focus
The focus of Egg magazine is largely on teenage girls who seek ways to be sexy and cute in the gyaru style. Images will often feature girls with blonde dyed hair or wigs, overt makeup, nail decorations, and mini-skirts. The look is almost exclusively for teens, with most of the shops catering to the style existing in Shibuya 109 and its surrounding teen-centric shopping district.
Similar magazines in the genre exist, such as Cawaii!, though most other fashion magazines, such as JJ or CanCam focus on a more mature, older audience between upper teen and early twenties age groups.
Gyaru Fashion
The literal translation of Gyaru to English is “gal” and originated from a brand of jeans in the 1970s of the same name that marketed toward young women in their teens and early twenties. The word has evolved over time with a peak usage in the 1980s and a recent resurgence. Now, it almost entirely applies to teenage girls in high school with a particular style and look.
There are a few varying kinds of Gyaru girls which Egg Magazine covers including:
- Ganguro – girls with artificial tans and dyed blonde hair.
- Manba – girls with deep tan and white makeup, with long combed hair usually died a light color.
- Bibinba – girls who wear large amounts of gold and jewelry.
- Banba – girls who wear long stilettos and slippers, use glitter, and often highlight their hair. Additional aspects may include false eyelashes, colored contact lenses, and thick makeup.
There are many other variations of the style, and it evolves regularly, as covered by Egg Magazine. At any given time, the focus of the magazine might be on any number of Gyaru styles, depending on what is biggest in Tokyo at the time.