Neural Fad

Neural Fad reimagines Tokyo street fashion history to examine the relationship between AI and memory.

In post-war Japan, distinctive magazines and television cultivated an aspirational youth culture that gave rise to unique fashion subcultures at different train stations around Tokyo. Inspired by the rebellious spirit of each generation and their projections towards an imagined future, Kusano produces records of subcultures that never actually existed.

Reimagining the rich vocabulary and history of Tokyo street fashion through AI, the collection takes the viewer across and beyond the post-war decades of Japanese fashion history — from the Moga and Mobo of the 1940s to the Japanese hippies known as the Fūten Tribe, the Karasu Tribe of the 90s and the Gyaru and Decora fashion of the late 90s and early 2000 — to present Tokyo street fashion as imagined beyond time.

Through this collaboration between AI and Japanese street fashion archives that she herself contributed to as a street photographer of Harajuku fashion, Kusano uses emerging technologies to offer a retro-futuristic intervention into the landscape of Tokyo street fashion.