What Happened to Gyaru?

It feels almost quaint, in 2025, to talk about gyaru as a "living" subculture. Yes, there once was a time when gyaru was something alive and complex: a youth culture driven by aesthetics and fun-seeking, informed by popular Tokyo trends as much as by any urge to push back against Japan's social and beauty norms. It wasn’t a political rebellion (most gyaru abandoned the style by their mid-twenties, slipping back into conventional respectability), but for a brief moment, it offered a flashy, unruly alternative to what was expected of young women. 

Somewhere along the way, though, what was once a loud, oftentimes gaudy playground for young women (more about chasing trends and nightlife than any radical feminist agenda) was flattened into a marketable costume. Today’s mainstream gyaru is polished, influencer-friendly, and far removed from the chaotic scenes of girls who once embraced the style simply because they loved how it looked, spending hours and paychecks to go out with their friends, rather than building an online cult of personality.

It’s an inflammatory claim, but I’ll make it: gyaru, as we knew it, is dead. Not in the literal sense; there are still girls who bleach their hair, tan their skin, and pile on lashes. But culturally, gyaru functions more like Heisei cosplay these days, a retro aesthetic Japan (and Western devotees of Japanese fashion) resurrect to sell nostalgia, divorced from the nuanced realities that once surrounded it. The most visible faces of gyaru now are influencers, “talents,” and models who perform an algorithm-friendly version of the style.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Japan itself, the birthplace of gyaru. Shibuya (once the heart of gyaru) is now home to a so-called “gyaru school,” where teenagers pay to learn how to market themselves. They slip into kawaii seifuku, practice applying makeup, taking selfies from the best angles, and study the basics of social media strategy. It’s easy to be cynical about it, especially when the promise of becoming an “influencer” is packaged as an aspirational end goal. However, it’s not entirely bleak: the school also offers English and Korean conversation lessons. And in a world that increasingly runs on content, learning to edit and build a personal brand can open real doors. Still, there’s something disheartening in seeing gyaru (once a style worn out in public for the sheer joy of it) reshaped into a formal training ground for influencer culture.

I have to ask: is this all that gyaru is now? A gimmick to set you apart on social media? A training ground for future influencers? The short answer is yes, at least in the mainstream, at least online. Gyaru has largely been reduced to a set of visual signifiers, optimized for TikTok’s discover page and Instagram’s explore algorithm. It’s a look you can buy, a persona you can take on and off. The reckless energy that once defined it, the cliques that loitered around Shibuya 109, the at-home bleach jobs that left hair feeling like straw, the money spent on sunbeds and tanning lotions, the cheap plastic accessories stacked high because more was always more, has been replaced by a commercial pipeline that prioritizes online attention over everything else.

Subcultures have always risked this fate. Dick Hebdige (a near fixture around here, given how often I bring him up) wrote decades ago about how subversive style inevitably gets stripped of meaning and repackaged for mass consumption. Fashion is an industry, after all. Someone always profits from outsider aesthetics. But there’s something uniquely hollow about the current incarnation of gyaru. It’s become content. Its chaotic vitality now competes (and loses) with the cold logic of platform capitalism.

You can see it everywhere: from thoughtful YouTubers trying to maintain integrity to someone like MrBeast, who’s turned the platform into a hyper-optimized spectacle machine. I don’t doubt he genuinely loves making videos. That doesn’t make his content any less soulless. It’s just how these systems work: they reward whatever keeps people watching, clicking, and sharing. So, of course, the edges of whatever you’re doing start to smooth out or exaggerate in ways that fit the platform’s demands. It’s simply the tradeoff when you build a version of yourself meant to be consumed.

This is something I’ve written about before: how platforms like TikTok and Instagram are structurally hostile to real subculture. They reward trends that are easy to replicate and sell. They flatten complexity, favoring reproducibility over authenticity. A true subculture doesn’t fit neatly into short-form video or a Twitter (X) thread. If anything, it resists being packaged at all.

Does that mean gyaru is gone completely? Not exactly. It exists now in much the same way it always truly did: within the people who really fucking love it. That might sound crass, but it’s true. And to be clear, I’m not pretending that even the most devoted gyaru (past or present) weren’t also hungry for attention or validation. They absolutely were. But there’s a fundamental difference between chasing that attention on the streets, risking confusion or ridicule from people who don’t get it, and performing for an online audience that’s already primed to approve. The gyaru who are still out there today might be seeking eyes, just like their predecessors, but now, your look doesn’t have to stand up to strangers on the sidewalk. You can craft it for a curated niche, post it, and never have to step outside at all.

Real gyaru (the kind that still has teeth) doesn’t live in curated feeds. It survives in the personal thrill of putting it all on because it looks cool and you love it, in wanting to be gyaru for the sake of gyaru itself. 

So few gals these days are gal purely for the love of it, which is exactly why gyaru feels so watered down. Not because making money off it is inherently unethical, but because it comes at a cost. The moment you monetize your gyaru identity, it divides in two: one that’s personal, and one that exists to meet financial and platform demands. And once you start garnering a bit of money or attention, the commercial side almost always takes precedence. That’s simply the nature of turning something into a job: it stops being driven purely by personal passion and becomes accountable to metrics, audiences, and algorithms. Your decisions start to hinge on what generates income or visibility, not just what you genuinely want to do. It doesn’t mean you stop caring about gyaru, but it does mean your relationship to it fundamentally changes.

Of course, not everyone who monetizes or chases attention is some cartoon sellout. Plenty just adapt because it’s what keeps them visible, relevant, or rewarded by the platforms they’re on. But it’s still a shift worth recognizing: once your identity as a gyaru becomes tied to online validation (whether through likes, followers, or brand deals), the way you engage with it inevitably changes. That’s the real tragedy, not that people want to be seen, but that this is what being seen demands.

Since gyaru is, for all practical purposes, dead as a street culture, most people now learn about it online. Historically, gyaru was transmitted through embodied, co-present interactions. The subcultural codes were largely cultivated on-site, learned through immersion in spaces where social meaning was constructed collectively and reinforced through direct, in-person experiences. 

The rise of what sociologist Frank Furedi calls “bedroom culture” has only accelerated this shift. Where gyaru was once inherently public, it can now be performed entirely within the confines of a private room. Media technology has enabled a hyper-personalized practice of gyaru, one that doesn’t require stepping outside or risking the judgment of strangers. On the surface, this might seem empowering: everyone is free to interpret the style however they wish. But pushed to its logical extreme, this relentless personalization fosters a kind of hostile individualism. Any suggestion of shared standards or communal aesthetics is treated as an imposition. You see it clearly in the unwillingness of some to learn the technical foundations of gyaru makeup. They’d rather “do it their way,” and expect the broader community to simply accept it. That might be harmless if it stayed private, but of course, it doesn’t. It’s broadcast online, framed as gyaru, and defended fiercely against critique. In this way, bedroom culture hasn’t just privatized the practice of gyaru; it’s fragmented its collective meaning, turning a once socially negotiated style into a series of solitary declarations, each demanding recognition on its own uncompromising terms.

These solitary declarations don’t exist in a vacuum; they circulate through digital channels. Tutorials, coordinates, even the social rules of gyaru are mediated by platforms that favor clear, replicable content. This has produced an entirely new vocabulary for what it means to be gyaru, one shaped by the influencer economy. It’s almost as if today’s gyaru and the gyaru of the past aren’t even speaking the same language anymore. Perhaps that’s why so many veterans have quietly stepped back. Even if they still consider themselves gyaru, they no longer engage with the community in the same way, because the community they knew has effectively vanished. And how can you participate fully when the very terms of belonging (the cultural codes, references, shared understandings) have been rewritten into something almost unintelligible?