Chicken Chicken, Shake Shake: How Kawai took over the world

Marc Jacobs is crazy about Yayoi Kusama, Niki Minaj is dancing with three-dimensional hieroglyphs, Nikola Formichetti is drawing a mascot panda, and Wachowski is shooting a film about a Korean woman from the future. If the latest advertising McDonalds ate into your brain, and friends far from cosplay suddenly

Text: Mikhail Baryshnikov

Illustrations: Alexandra Gooch

switched to kawai emoticons, you already know - the ubiquitous HYIP in Asia has reached an unhealthy peak. We asked the director of SNC fashion and the man who succumbed to Asian hysteria with us, Mikhail Baryshnikov, to understand the origins of the phenomenon.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

fashion director SNC

Not so long ago, while filming a family of a political leader, I noticed toys for his children, about which I had once heard from my friend: that offspring in a preterist state demanded freaks named bakugan — plastic balls that open up when they hit the ground in a strange-looking creature, obviously, Japanese-animated ethnogenesis. As it turned out, more important things than owning such a bestiary, among five to eight-year-old children, are not there now, if they at least somehow know that 2012 is the year of the yard, of course. Good groundwork for the future.

I remember Chip and Dale with the main sexual fantasy of 20th century kindergarteners - rat Gadget, "Duck stories" and "Black Cloak" (I have always associated a negative hero with school cleaners, which was especially loved for the accuracy of the image). I even remember the Disney Little Mermaid and Gummy Bears. I am sure that all this painted svolota more than once comes around in my mind with a new mental illness. And for them, people of the future, the Bakugans will become these memories.

REMEMBER CHIP AND DALE WITH MAJOR SEXUAL FANTASY OF CHILDREN WITH PUBLIC WOOR

Now maneki some standing at my home collected from microscopic Chinese designer

If earlier, due to cultural isolation, all Kawai seals seemed to be inconceivably distant and at best were incomprehensible statuettes from merchants who were huddled behind Pavilion №71 "Atomic Energy" at the All-Russian Exhibition Center, now Maneki is somehow at my house, assembled from microscopic , again the Chinese designer. This is neither good nor bad, this is a given. The future is not in the Old World, America or the Middle East: it is written in pagodas and on the arcuate bridges of China, Japan, and the entire Far East. Do not be surprised that the dram-embroidered coat now shows a Belgian named Dries van Notein, or that the Englishman Gareth Pugh invites you to pretend to be a geisha for the summer of the coming year. Fashion has always actively responded to the social situation. Before the war, unification - after luxury. Now the same thing is happening. We slowly get used to the new order of things. The combination of cultures, migration.

Leading glossy magazines publish on their covers J-pop and K-pop-performers. Dazed under the temporary leadership of Formichetti, for a moment, the main panda and the dance lord of the most popular monsters of show business, goes with singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and actress Angela Yeung Wing on the cover. I-D, anticipating this, printed a whole clip of covers last season - their Rise and Shine history is exemplary in this sense. Is it worth talking about how Asia is firmly entrenched in us, if almost everyone has emoji and without Japanese smiles and hieroglyphs, we can not even say good night to each other. James Bond, for example, would seem to be a modest English spy, but in the last film about him one of the most beautiful scenes takes place against the background of huge holographic hieroglyphs and cyclopean sizes of jellyfish. Or another super-tedious and wildly popular film Cloud Atlas, which revolves around the Korean woman from the future. And Kenzo sweaters with tigers, which for * Bali are already even more than neoprene Balenciaga with Liquid Skye.

Without Japanese smiles and hieroglyphs we can't even say good night to each other

After all, it’s not news that everything that surrounds us, including Cupertin's iPhones, is made in China, that all dental nanopastes and pulling up serums are from Japan, that half of any menu of an average Moscow restaurant consists of variations of seaweed-wrapped salmon and miso soup. The most promising language is Chinese.

The fastest growing economy, too. When asked where it is good now, they boldly answer that in Thailand or Bali. It is not surprising that the world podiums for the third season plunged deeper into the theme of the East, and even the most not eastern collection of summer 2013 - Jean Paul Gaultier - ended with the song Queen of China Town performed by Amanda Lear.

No need to be a conspiracy theorist and painful paranoid zadroty to understand: the fashion to the East from a trend of purely stylistic has already degenerated into something global. Even the cars that have always been customary to love German, or, at the very least, English, are now mostly Japanese, Korean, or, excuse me, Chinese. And this is no longer a harmless expansion of culture at the level of designer Yamamoto or promateri of all "Com de Garzon" by Ray Kawakubo, this is everyday life in which Cherry and Kia cars push a bucket of nuts called "Lada" out of the way. Fearfully? I don’t, because Kia is better than Moskvich, and Cherry is better than Lada Priory. Is it sad Well, ok, maybe someday I will be visited by nostalgia for garage men, smeared with fuel oil, who spent less time driving than under the hood. Or by the time when the word "sushi" sounded proud and no one yet knew that it was necessary to say "sushi".

FASHION IN THE EAST ALREADY TURNED INTO SOMETHING GLOBAL

The more it threatens except that we are with you now distinguish kogyaru and gankuro from otaku and harajuku?

It is difficult to say what else this threatens, besides the fact that you and I now distinguish kogyar and gankuro from otaku and harajuku. That, however, is still the hardest task for me. Perhaps we should come to some conclusion, probably, it should be terrible. For me, this conclusion will be this: the fence, behind which the grass is greener, is now somewhere in the region of the eastern end of Asia, and yes, this fence collapsed ... on us. And this is good, because it is * I am tech.