Guanciale, amore mio. This one’s a long time coming…
Tonight we’ll dive into a wonderful publication from Japan’s recent past: the great “Last Orgy 2”, a column on streetwear and streetwear-adjacent pop culture first printed in Takarajima (Treasure Island, a magazine that then centered on subcultures in Japan) in the early 90s.
a beautiful old Takarajima cover
Online, some fans describe it as a full-blown publication in its own right, some as an insert. Some say it was later printed in other famous magazines like Popeye, the “Magazine for City Boys” known to connoisseurs of editorial design. But I haven’t been able to get my hands on a print copy of the column to verify any of the above — they’re hard to find!
“Last Orgy 2”’s mystery, a byproduct of its scant documentation, is an enduring part of my attraction. I’m not a sneakerhead or a drop-chaser or the kind of person that would be able to tell SS10s from FW13s, but in an age of ever-increasing information accessibility, the whispered arcana of international streetwear dorks have an appeal. People like to obsess over a moment through the publications they make and read, and looking back at them can be a small but powerful act of historical voyeurism.
issue 15
For years, one could seek and occasionally find scans of the column online, passed around by people with the kind of veneration Deadhead bootleggers reserve for notable recordings. (I think often of Nick Paumgarten’s excellent New Yorker story on the subject: “Each tape seemed to have its own particular note of decay, like the taste of the barnyard in a wine or a cheese.”)
Why? Because when it comes to Harajuku in the 90s, “Last Orgy 2” was a bit like a state newspaper for underground culture aficionados, despite only being a two-page spread. It covered Nike drops, bootleg Cypress Hill t-shirts, Johnny Rotten’s bracelets, fashionized climbing pants, notable Sega releases, Ren and Stimpy, coaches jackets, military jackets, duffel coats, freaky jewelry, the current issue of Vibe magazine, and lots and lots of straight-up toys.
issue 16
The column was written and edited by Nigo, who founded the clothing company Bape, and Jun Takahashi (“Jonio”), who founded Undercover (forever and ever the best label name). They also ran an IRL store, NOWHERE, where they sold some of the earliest hypebeast gear as we’d recognize it today, like limited-edition tees, hoodies, sneakers, and toys.
the NOWHERE storefront
Between the store and “Last Orgy 2”, they inundated Tokyo with American (and American-inspired) street style culture. A lot of the merch in both the magazine and the store were products of Nigo’s and Takahashi’s own brands and sub-brands and friends’ brands and short-lived side projects, many of which borrowed from American brands the now-ubiquitous practice of slapping logos, graphics, or copy on tees or hoodies to create a whole line (a practice perhaps traceable to Dapper Dan, the bootleg legend of 1980s Harlem).
The column’s fantastic name is simply a continuation of its predecessor’s. “Last Orgy”, by the g o d f a t h e r s of Japanese streetwear Hiroshi Fujiwara and Kan Takagi, set the foundations for Nigo and Takahashi, but its impact hasn’t been as long-lasting. “Last Orgy” was a song by the original duo’s rap group Tiny Panx. Here they are — hardcore ripping off Eric B. & Rakim!! — doing the bop that started it all.
THE corduroy ensemble
On a meta level, Nigo and Takahashi were running an underground pipeline from New York to Tokyo. Imagine if you will … before the internet … magazines, a storefront, a street scene, and nightlife coming together to build a community around what’s cool in other cities. It wasn’t the first effort to elucidate American fashion for Japanese readers (this book — a photographic study of what guys were wearing on Ivy League campuses in the the 50s and 60s — might hold that honor [here’s a full scan]), but “Last Orgy 2” was so successful that despite its three-ish-year run, its creators can still release LO2 collections that sell out. American readers gleaned a ton about Japanese fashion from this scene, too: they not only learned about underground Tokyo’s growing street fashion world but saw the US reflected back at them through Nigo’s and Takahashi’s editorship.
from, you guessed it, the follow-up column
That cross-pollinating naivete is the history that hooks me … subcultures mixing and overlapping with appreciation and even outright theft.
“Last Orgy 2” obsessed over clothes and media from a wide variety of styles — hip hop, punk, skateboarding, and later Americana like Southwestern jewelry, Hawaiian prints, and motorcycle jackets — laid out in spreads replete with rap stances and restless, amateurish typography.
historic Good Old Raisins and Peanuts!
While we might decry appropriation, I also recognize the omnivorous creative appetites of young people … the irrepressible desire to go out and make something with your friends about the thing you’re most psyched about at that very instant no matter how much you actually know about the subject or if there’s an audience for it.
Buried the lede as far as I could, but while scans of the column are almost impossible to find now, comrades at ARCHIVE.pdf have shared some with me containing many issues of “Last Orgy 2” and its successor “Last Orgy 3” ANNOTATED with English translations. Enjoy :)
And someone please buy this gorgeous $1100 longsleeve tee that explains the story of the column on the back.
love,
alex
ʕ ·ᴥ·ʔ SOON: FINALLY a great way to eat a pomegranate!!
PS: As I mentioned, Japanese magazines famously publish wonderful, pathbreaking graphic design. Flip through a 1990 issue of Takarajima for a mere whiff of that energy. (And here’s that issue’s “Last Orgy”.)
PSS: Why not? Here’s a smattering of incredible images from Undercover’s publications over the years, also from ARCHIVE.pdf:
