Oh! My God!! Harajuku Girl / Chapter 3, Part 4: “My Fashion Secrets”
I buy wigs on Yahoo! Auctions
I’d love to have fun with all different kinds of fashion. And to match my fashion, I’d like to change the color and style of my hair! The magical items that make those wishes come true are wigs.
When I was in high school, the school rules were really strict and we weren’t allowed to dye our hair, so I often used to use wigs after school and days I had off. It’s so easy: just by changing your hair color you can totally change the impression you give, and when all is said and done, just wearing it makes you look good!
I have about ten of them in all. Lately I’ve been using Prisila wigs, but when I was in high school I won bids for new ones on Yahoo! Auctions for about 2,000 yen*. My dad helped me up until the payment by bank transfer.
If you were to take one look at my standard style during my high school days - my own natural hair - it was a round, black bob with slightly heavy bangs, but on the inside I’d buzzed all my hair off [on one section], bleached that part, and dyed stuff like a heart pattern using pink and yellow on it. At first glance, I had black hair. If you lifted up the hair on the sides [of my head], red hearts would appear!
During long breaks like summer and winter vacation I would dye [my hair] all over as I had been waiting and waiting to do, but bleaching and dyeing it over and over damaged and fried my hair. Even still, I couldn’t stop being stylish.
One time I dyed my real hair blonde and wore a black wig to school. I had my priorities completely backwards, didn’t I? The teacher totally exposed me on this one. “Take off your hairpiece,” they warned me during class. ‘Hairpiece’… how embarrassing.
Afterwards, I was called to the teacher’s lounge and lectured that wigs were indeed banned! I was in my third year of high school and on break until graduation because our graduation exams were over, so I’d dyed my hair platinum blonde for my photo shoots. I thought that if I wore a wig at the graduation ceremony there’d be no problem, but when I was found out through my hair examination, naturally I was nervous and anxious about what would happen.
My mom, who can’t just sit by and watch things, called the school and negotiated with them for me. “Our daughter has decided to work as a model after graduation, and dyes her hair in connection to her job. Couldn’t we manage one way or another? We can make her wear a black wig to the graduation ceremony,” [she said to them]. But when I was called to the teacher’s lounge afterwards, they told me, “Regulation is regulation, so we cannot allow wigs. If you don’t dye it back to black, you won’t be able to graduate,” and said that even spraying it black was not allowed.
I’d already decided on my future career, and it’d also been decided that I was going to graduate, but not being able to graduate because of my hair… I was so depressed, I cried. They eventually permitted me to spray my hair black, but even when I sprayed it there were spots that wouldn’t take, and I ended up looking like a grandma with white and grey hair.
In the end, I showed up to my graduation ceremony with a black wig on. I even had battles about my hair during my third year of high school.
I don’t want to be like anyone else!
“I don’t want to be like anyone else!” is something I’ve thought ever since I got interested in fashion.
Maybe it was because I had that thought at the front [of my mind], but when I was in my first year of high school I went berserk with ridiculously gaudy outfits. Back when I didn’t appear in magazines much, I was pretty awful! I loved pink, ribbons, and frilly things, so I’d wear huge, bright pink ribbons about twice the size of my head, pink polka-dotted skirts, and so on. When I went to Universal Studios Japan, little kids mistook me for the show girls and took pictures with me. I felt like a star. I also used to wear straw hats made for kids, and randsels**. As you’d expect, now I just can’t do fashion like that. It was fun though!
When I got into my second year of high school, my tastes changed a bit and I decided to try starting up the ‘Harajuku Fairy-Tale Revolution’. But then it felt like all of a sudden, there were a bunch of [people doing it too], so that was a no-go. Mori girl is cute too, but it’d already been done, so I didn’t want to do that either. I wanted to do fashion that nobody else was doing!
With that thought in mind, I pursue fashion every day. Maybe if you follow the flow of time, after this, I might change again like how the clothes I tend to wear have changed from my first year of high school until now. Or maybe I’ll be more subdued. But I can tell you that my feelings about not wanting to be like anyone else will never change.
END OF CHAPTER
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» Go on to Interview: Bon-chan x Kyary, Part 1 »
Liner Notes
* 2,000 yen is approximately $25 USD at the current exchange rate, as of May 2012.
** Randsels are leather bags used by Japanese children in elementary school.
Disclaimer
Any words in [brackets] are words that I added/changed for clarity, or are implied by the text but not explicitly said.
Credits
Translation by kyarychan @ http://kyarychan.tumblr.com
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