Voila! The world where the coolness prevails. The lovely part of Manhattan with the smell of the old passion.
Before I headed to where I had to, I noticed the source of the latest hype of SOHO.
UNIQLO.
What a beautiful store. It just had a launching party with a very famous sushi chef serving it. Everyone seemed so expectant. Its signs were all over the city a few months before its existence.
I laughed at it. Again...? I thought I won't see it again after I left Tokyo, its birth city.
As I remeber, UNIQLO was nothing about coolness. It was just very affordable, yet colorful, yet too simple for my taste. Another GAP. Even worse, I even hated it because of its ubiquity (The only everywhere-store that i liked in japan was Mos burger, because it was just amazingly good, and because it was food, you can't complain about food ^^) . The same reason I hate Starbucks. There were just too many stores. I shopped there only once when i had too. But my pink underwear even didn't last a month. And my purple hoodie ruined all my light colored clothes.
Maybe it is just my personal impression. But Hiro didn't also like it, and he complained his mother kept buying there. Anyway, in any measure UNIQLO in Tokyo wasn't even as half impressive as the one in SOHO.
I think it is the beautiful work of Globalizstion. The magic that happens when something crosses over between cultures. Which makes Dunkin Donuts gourmet in Seoul, and makes Gap gool in Tokyo. Something very interesting happens in-between. I love it.
And its amazing catalog. With short bios of each street models who seemed coordinated their style on their own, covering from Williamsburg, New York to Harajuku, Tokyo. And semi-heroic bios of its makers and designers. The whole thing is almost like japanese anime in its intensity. Ah! Japanese anime is only That anime outside of Japan.
There's something to learn in UNIQLO's marketing success even with annoying ubiquity.
I promise i will never shop in UNIQLO but i don't know how long I can keep it.
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