Gyaru (ギャル or gal) has always been associated with youth.
Perhaps the most youthful gal substyle is kogyaru, a contraction of kōkōsei gyaru or high school gal. As the name implies, this style was almost exclusively worn by teenage girls and is denoted by scrunch socks draped over loafers, light hair, a tanned complexion, and a shortened uniform skirt. Originating in the 90s, it allowed free-spirited teens to assert their autonomy, finding a way to express themselves within the rigid confines of the Japanese school uniform.
As is the perverse way of humanity, the substyle was ostensibly fetishized. These underaged girls became the sexual fantasies of men far too old to be involved with them. That is to say, pedophiles. There is no room for ambiguity here.
While kogyaru are not responsible for the deviant desires of older men, the ease and candor with which salarymen expressed their infatuation with high school girls went a long way to normalizing it. The sexual objectification of kogyaru became a prominent theme in men's magazines such as SPA!, Takarajima, and Friday as early as 1993. As a result, this absurd belief that high school-aged girls are not only "sexy" but are in their sexual prime has become ingrained in Japanese society, as evidenced by popular manga and anime.
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| My First Girlfriend Is a Gal (Japanese: はじめてのギャル, Hepburn: Hajimete no Gyaru, lit. "My First Gal") |
As a woman, the message is all too clear: Youth is the be-all-end-all. High school is the prime of your life.
This isn't only a Japanese issue. It's universal.
As an American on Tiktok, I was inundated with video after video of young women from all sorts of cultural backgrounds teaching each other how to avoid "premature" wrinkles by not expressing emotion and advising girls as young as 13 (!!!!!) to invest in a variety of expensive creams and lotions to ensure they age gracefully.... whatever the hell that means.
We're mortal beings; aging is as inevitable as death and taxes. It's not something you can outwit or beat. The game is rigged, and we're guaranteed to lose.
Why play?
There is an ingrained belief in most societies that a woman's value is dependent on her youth and beauty. In colloquial conversation, youth is often interchangeable with beauty; rather, beauty cannot exist without youth.
In her essay "Dogs, Cats, and Dancers: Thoughts about Beauty," American author Ursula K. Le Guin sums it up well: "One rule of the game, in most times and places, is that it's the young who are beautiful. The beauty ideal is always a youthful one."
As women, we're instructed to use our fleeting youth and beauty (gather ye rosebuds while ye may...) to secure a husband so that we may perform our second most sacred duty: bear our husband's children.
Even as we age, we are required to play the beauty game all the same, but the rules have changed. We must be mature. Elegant. Hemlines must not be too short nor necklines too low. We must not be provocative. And if we can't be beautiful (that is, youthful), we must at least "look good for our age."
If we cannot abide by these regulations, we then must gracefully accept that our husbands and boyfriends (I'm being heteronormative on purpose) may seek sex outside of our partnership. They may even trade us in for a younger model. Unlike men, whose wisdom and maturity are seen as desirable traits, women are judged based on the firmness and suppleness of their skin.
Gyaru, like many other fashion subcultures born out of Japan, is a subculture made by women for women (See Gyauro for its masculine counterpart). That being said, it is not untouched by sexist ideologies.
The main aspect of gyaru that drew me in was that it's not simply a fashion statement - it's a culture. And that culture has a pronounced contempt for what society "expects" of women. When Japanese society deemed porcelain white skin the beauty ideal, gyaru tanned. When women were expected to be modest in both dress and behavior, gyaru were loud and flashy. The gyaru mantra puts it perfectly: be wild and sexy.
You may think that a group so anti-cultural would spit in the face of these traditional and sexist ideas regarding aging and what it means to be a woman... but do they actually?
I found gyaru when I was 27. It happened like most things do these days: on the internet. I stumbled across scans of Heisei-era gyaru fashion mags like Egg, Happie Nuts, and Ageha. I became obsessed, devouring every morsel of gyaru content I could get my deco-nailed hands on.
I loved everything about it: the fashion, the culture, the camaraderie between gals. I loved how broad it was and how many substyles there were to experiment with. I loved that these girls were living their lives on their own terms, no holds barred.
However, I began to observe that most gyaru were exceptionally young. All the fashion magazines featured models between the ages of 16 and 24. Even street-style snapshots of gyaru in the wilds of Harajuku and Shibuya were all extremely youthful, hardly a day over 25.
Returning to the earlier subject of high school gals, there's a term frequently used in gyaru circles for when a gyaru decides to hang up her Alba Rosa coat for good. They graduate.
I've observed that most gyaru aren't gyaru for life. They typically retire from the style in their late twenties in favor of a more conventional life and manner of dressing. If they still consider themselves gyaru at all, it's usually as an Onee gyaru or older sister gal, a more subdued and mature look. It is seen as the "natural" evolution for gals in their late twenties and early thirties.
So here I was, starting my gyaru journey at the age when most graduate. What's a gal to do?
It's my most humble opinion that gyaru found me at the perfect time. I am 28 years old, and it is only now, at the tail-end of my 20s, that I feel youthful and free. My body and soul are as aligned as they have ever been.
My teenhood and most of my twenties were consumed by clinical depression, which stole whatever "prime" I was allegedly supposed to be enjoying during those tender years. I was highly suicidal, and the entirety of my days were spent trying to keep myself alive. There was no room to be wild and sexy. I was barely a functioning human.
To then be told that I somehow missed out on the best years of my life felt like a punch to the gut. In despair, I asked myself, "If those were the best years, what horrors were to come?"
But things got better. Little by little, and with a lot of therapy and hard work, I came out the other side. It's an ongoing battle, but not a daily fight for my life.
I'm far happier now at 28 than I ever was at 16 or 21.
Becoming a gyaru at 27 has allowed me to reclaim my lost youth in ways both metaphorical and literal, and I don't intend to stop. It has enriched my life.
Gyaru has always been a subculture that pushed boundaries and rebelled against the social and aesthetic standards that hold us hostage. Is it not in that spirit that we continue dressing and behaving exactly how we want, regardless of age?
I don't think one's ability to be wild and sexy somehow diminishes when they get older. Life is wild, and experience is sexy. We should not deprive ourselves of the joys of being impermanent and ever-changing beings because... what? The Old Guard says so? There's nothing more un-gyaru than bending the knee to a system or ideology that is antithetical to how YOU want to live your life.
I get to define my beauty; I choose it. It's not something thrust upon me without my consent, nor is it conducted for male validation or attention. It is deeply personal.
This is what gyaru means to me.
Gyaru may have emerged, like many great subcultures do, from the creative and restless youth, but it's not synonymous with it.
Life doesn't end after 25, and neither should gyaru.
