Now Online: Nana and Vivienne Westwood: A Manga’s Ode to Punk Style A story of coincidence turned timeless. Nana, Ai-Yazawa’s 2000’s josei manga masterpiece turned anime, ingeniously uses fashion to express its characters’ internal selves and conflicts, from lingering hopes to aching wounds. The outfits showcased in Nana are heavily inspired by early Harajuku subcultures [Gyaru and Mori-Girl] plus Vivienne Westwood's pioneering punk designs, which gained traction in Japan during the 90s-00s. Ai Yazawa [the iconic manga-ka behind the series] was a fashion school dropout choosing to pursue illustration instead. Infusing her fashion background in her work, Yazawa uses clothing to convey her character's emotional states. Nana centers on two 20-year old girls named Nana, who as if tied by destiny, sit next to each other on the same train to Tokyo both on a mission to change their lives. These recent strangers, Nana Osaki and Nana Komatsu, end up sharing the same apartment as roommates and become deeply enmeshed in each others’ ambitions, with Osaki climbing the steep path to punk rock stardom and Komatsu trying to forge her own identity without relying on romantic validation. Nana’s raw portrayal of self-determination through art and reinvention of one’s self-image continues to resonate with the youthful longing of finding the ideal self and being loved for it. It’s no coincidence that a manga all about the searching for identity so artfully uses fashion as a visual expression of this search. Nana is truly a crash course on Y2K Tokyo subculture style, an underrated source of fashion education a decade after its publication on the era’s trends for readers today, and Yazawa’s love letter to the “Queen Of Punk” Vivienne Westwood. [Full Article in our Link in Bio] image 5 by @choom.online @thecomm.online