Self-Consciousness, Band T-shirts, and Me ② Mid-to-Late 90s

I will write this while reflecting on how I approached band T-shirts.
Click here for the previous part ①, about my middle and high school days.

The period when I couldn't wear band T-shirts

I moved to Tokyo in the mid-90s. I no longer had to wear a school uniform, and the clothes I wore began to take on a stronger meaning of self-expression. After moving to Tokyo, I found myself in an environment where there were relatively many music lovers around me.

As for myself around the mid-to-late 90s, even in an era without streaming services or YouTube, I listened to music enthusiastically—both old and new, Western and Japanese—despite some genre bias, and I went to concerts, but I have neither memories nor records (photos) of myself wearing band T-shirts.

The T-shirt that came with Trattoria menu 100 is still sleeping at the bottom of my dresser, unopened.

Speaking within the narrow scope of what I knew, when I recall the band T-shirt situation of music-loving kids around 20 years old (centered on rock) between 1994 and 1997,I remember that there were quite a few men who wore them.I remember it that way.

Around this time, many people's clothing reflected their musical preferences; kids who liked UK rock wore Fred Perry or Lonsdale, guitar-pop fans wore striped shirts and cardigans, and psychedelic/garage fans wore patterned, tight vintage shirts or dresses. I have an image of people in university HR/HM (Hard Rock/Heavy Metal) clubs wearing dark T-shirts (I wonder if those were band T-shirts) and shorts. In the youth HR/HM scene of this era, things like alternative metal or what would later be called loud rock were preferred, and there were no metalheads wearing the tight leather pants associated with the 80s. Incidentally, I have the impression that people in the jazz club were always wearing stylish hats.
Come to think of it, techno fans were the ones who wore printed T-shirts the most. More than the musicians themselves, they wore logos of audio equipment manufacturers or game-related shirts. Also, they had a high rate of wearing baggy pants with lots of pockets; I wonder what the influence for that was. Maybe it was convenient for dancing at clubs?
Since I was completely unfamiliar with the hip-hop scene, I, as a ZEST customer, was intimidated by the mood of the tough-looking people in front of Manhattan Records.
And this wasn't due to any influence or cultural background, but people who were broke from buying all sorts of music, mainly rock, would usuallyuse a Disk Union bagas a bag, wearing tattered denim and dirty vintage military coats.

Having said that, it's not like everyone was always dressed like that, and it's not like kids wearing Target T-shirts didn't listen to grunge; it was common to wear a Muji shirt, listen to Swedish pop, and also listen to G-funk.
Of course, you can't know everything from someone's clothes, butthere were certain musical preferences you could gauge from their clothing.

(Postscript)If we're talking about band T-shirts in the late 90s,
Hi-STANDARDis a topic that cannot be ignored,
and in fact, the center of Japanese band T-shirt culture after that was this scene,
but my note basically focuses on Western rock T-shirts.
Around this time, my local friends who started owning cars
were all playing melodic hardcore while driving!

In such a climate, for someone wearing a band T-shirt—an item that directly reveals the band you like—it was almost never the case thatthey weren't actually listening to that band.

I repeat, this is within the narrow scope of what I knew, but young people around 20 years old who loved music were all suffering from a kind ofso-called 'fake' being extremely uncoolwhich is a type ofsophomore syndrome.

Furthermore, perhaps due to the atmosphere of that era, there was an environment where people not only self-deprecatingly mocked their own pasts but also enjoyed teasing or being sarcastic about others who didn't fit the values held by those with similar mindsets.
Or rather, I was like that.

Like, 'What's up with that guy using aReady Steady Go!record bag as an everyday bag when he doesn't even put records in it?' or 'That guy who suddenly started listening to them the momentRockin' Onpicked them up and acts like he knew them from before,' or 'I'm not sure about a guy who blindly buys every issue ofStudio Voiceregardless of the feature,' or 'I don't know about that person dressing exactly like Oyamada at that age.' Regardless of the reality, I would badmouth men who looked'shallow'to my eyes and yet werefull of confidencewith my friends. It looks like a very mean-spirited act, and I think it actually was, but there is a reason for this, so I will mention that later.

Since I had completely adopted such a mindset, it was out of the question to wear a band T-shirt without having listened to the band, andsimply having listened to themat a basic level and wearing it for the design was also something I resisted. Furthermore, I also felt that wearing a T-shirt of aband I liked relatively wellthat was amajor bandwhose T-shirts were easily available at the time, or a T-shirt witha design that was too iconicwas too cliché and embarrassing. You could say my mindset had changed significantly since my middle and high school days.

In addition to the above points, I think there were many otherreasons why I couldn't wearband T-shirts.
・There were still few sizes for women in band T-shirts.
・T-shirts of the bands I liked weren't sold in the first place.
・Even if there was a band T-shirt I liked, the design wasn't to my taste.
・I didn't have enough money to buy them as souvenirs from concerts or to support the band.
Overcoming these conditions was a high hurdle to begin with.

And, one of the decisive, major reasons was thatI was too embarrassed to show off the bands I liked by wearing their T-shirts.that was one of them.

If there are young people today who would feel too embarrassed to post on social media with a tag like #WantToConnectWithJapaneseRockFans, they might be able to relate to this feeling.

“You’re just self-conscious, nobody cares about your clothes.”I’ve seen this kind of opinion on this topic 300 million times, and while it might seem correct at first glance, there are actually quite a lot of people who care about what others are wearing, and they often make judgments on their own.

In the 90s, items that were as straightforward as band T-shirts carried too much meaning, and for someone like me—the type who, 20 or 30 years later, would end up writing such a long essay about the band T-shirts of that time—it was “the type who thinks too much”, it wasn't easy to just wear them. I certainly didn't think it was embarrassing for people who genuinely liked the band and looked good in them to wear them; in fact, I thought it was cool, but it was difficult for me at the time.

To be specific, the harms I feared from wearing a band T-shirt were:
・Being arbitrarily categorized as someone who only listens to that band and similar genres
・Being thought of as someone who just wants to show off that they like the band, in other words, “I love the version of myself that likes this band”
・Being strangely pounced on by people with a mysterious sense
that everyone who likes the same band is a friend and will definitely get along ・A girl in that band T-shirt? Yeah, yeah, influenced by a guy
・A girl in that band T-shirt? How impressive, how impressive, well then, you should listen to this too?

I think there are definitely people who understand that thinking a young girl in the late 90s would face this kind of scrutiny is not just being overly self-conscious. Back when X was still Twitter and 'likes' were 'favorites,' this topic came up 2 million times.
Or rather, even without wearing a band T-shirt, just the fact that a young woman is listening to Western music has led to experiences where men have made me feel uncomfortable, which is why I became overly self-conscious, and it leads back to the aforementioned story of venting to friends about these “shallow and overconfident” men who did these things.

I already had friends with similar values and acquaintances I could talk about music with, and I felt that the effort and downsides of finding a band T-shirt I wanted to wear outweighed the possibility of fun and peaceful encounters with new like-minded people, so I became even less interested in band T-shirts.

This is a story about music tastes and band T-shirts, but it could be replaced with other things from 90s subculture.

At that time, there were plenty of young people who liked clothes, anime, manga, and games, but there was also a culture (a culture?) where anime, manga, and game fans who weren't interested in fashion would bash kids who looked a bit stylish if they started talking about anime, manga, or games, calling them “posers”, but I'd need another 20,000 characters for that, so I'll save it for another time. These feelings change completely with just a few years of age difference and depend on the environment, so this is just a story about the landscape I saw.
By the way, around the end of the 90s, perhaps because I was a woman and due to my appearance, I had a first-encounter experience where a nerd who was 100% pure in his sense of appearance at the time gave me a nasty reaction, saying, 'Even if you say you like manga, you mean Taiyo Matsumoto, right? lol.' He probably had his own history that led him to adopt that attitude, but it was still unpleasant to be judged and categorized without permission.
This might be hard to understand if you're from a different generation, but it wasn't that liking Taiyo Matsumoto's work was looked down upon. “She’s openly saying she likes manga, but she must think she’s super niche for liking Taiyo Matsumoto, who is super mainstream from my perspective as someone who reads Spirits. People like this often pretend to like manga lately. Phew.” I instantly sensed the vibe of that sentiment. In a broad sense, my thought process is the same as this nerd's, so I understand.

Also, after leaving my small circle of like-minded people and entering the workforce, I met women with hobbies that aren't met with 'influenced by a guy, right?' (like Yaoi, Takarazuka, Johnny's, Visual Kei, etc.), and I deepened my understanding by hearing things like, 'The quality of self-consciousness about being embarrassed to show off your hobbies is different,' 'We have to hide it first,' and 'Even if we're the type to get immersed in hobbies, music is a hobby that makes you popular, so what we carried on our backs during our student days is completely different.' I have a lot in common with them, as our interests overlap within the generally minor-treated categories of 90s subculture, but the difference in where our main scene is is significant. It was an era in the process of transitioning from subculture to 'subculture (lol).' This topic is also long.

Returning to the topic of band T-shirts, as festival culture flourished starting with Fuji Rock, band T-shirts became more familiar, and there were more cute designs for girls from bands I liked, but I rarely bought or wore them, and my period of not being able to wear band T-shirts would last for 20 long years.

Next time, after turning 40, to the period of wearing band T-shirts…to be continued.