The Source

”Tokyo. The capital city of Japan. In 1991, its population numbered 11,923,346. Between day and evening, it differed by two million souls. The unparalleled city of night."

"Take the ecology. We pay lip service to it…as in, it doesn’t affect my lipstick. My hair mousse, however, that’s another matter. Don’t take my Freon out of the can, no matter what it’s doing to the ozone layer. Water shortage? I’ll stick with my shower in the morning and my bath at night. Forests in decline? Sorry, I need pulp for my manga and heavy gloss for my fashion magazines. […] The products are already in the store. Even if I boycott those goods, others will buy them. And if everyone is using Freon anyway, I may as well use it too…” (Hokuto)

Tokyo Babylon was one of my first manga. It mixes upbeat cheerfulness with dark social commentary and an occult flare. The manga is completely in love with dualities of all kinds (light/dark, ancient/modern, love/apathy…) and embraced negative space and heavily contrasting blacks in a way that was completely novel to me at the time.

Subaru was cute and had a very thriftable outfit for someone who at the time could not sew and did not have a sewing machine.

The Costume (2005)

I was able to thrift a red jacket that was sort of vaguely in the right ballpark, but then had absolutely no luck finding a hat with the right shape. I eventually gave up and made one myself by cutting up a shoebox and handsewing a broadcloth casing around it. The shape was roughly right, but the “craftsmanship” quality was highly questionable. :P The fabric I used wasn’t thick enough, so you could still see the shoebox branding through the thin fabric if you hit it with flash (oops). I should have spraypainted the cardboard black first. I found some leather gloves at Walmart and whipped up some onmyouji ofuda with a Sakura (heh) brush pen and some heavy art paper.

Photos

Reference