I am more than happy that there are quite a few new street fashion magazines these days and my plan is to introduce them one by one on here and on my instagram @streetfashion_archive. Some of thee magazines are promoted online and get flushed into my timeline, while I find others by accident – which of course fullfills me with excitement everytime this happens.

GRMO magazine is one of the ladder. I stumble upon it when I was browsing Tsutaya Books in Daikanyama. My expectations to find any street fashion mags were pretty low to be honest. Since I haven´t really had luck with that during my last trips to Tokyo I tried not to get my hopes up high. Granted I haven´t been to the Tsutaya in Daikanyama before, which turned out to be a big mistake! I found more stuff than I could dream of. Not only books and mags on street fashion but also what I call „street interior“ for a lack of better term. By this I mean interiors of regular people and not the ones of rich celebrities we see in Acrhitectural Digest for example.

However, as for GRMO I was able to get two issues, which are no. 8 and 9. I figured I´d compare new magazines to FRUiTS and to eachother, sonce FRUiTS is the OG of street fashion mags. The front cover is designed in a silimar style to FRUiTS mag with one or two people on the cover but all in all has a more futuristic Y2K inspired layout design when it comes to the typography and the adorable little „cyber bunny“ on most of the covers. A plus is that the cover tells you where the photos were taken. While the focus clearly lies on the trendy fashion districts of Tokyo such as Harajuku, Shibuya, Shimokita and Koenji, London is listed on one issue, but cities outside of Japan seem to be the exception. The pages inside also remind you of FRUiTS with the little profile box which tells you what items the person wears and occassionally lists their instagram profile.

The format of the mag is a bit larger (25,7 x 18,2 mm) than FRUiTS (21 x 15,3 mm) and while the photos are shot in a similar manner to FRUiTS– the typical street fashion frame we know – in some pictures the focus is off and some photos are even grainy and blurry. I don´t know if this was done on purpose, maybe old digital cameras were used to give an authentic Y2K visual feeling. While the format of the mag is larger than FRUiTS, with 40 pages it has less pages than FRUITS (FRUiTS has about 60 pages).
Fashion critics on social media keep talking about how japanese street fashion is dead and hiw fast fashion killed it, when in fact it just is different. The publication of quite a few new books and magazones on japanese street fashion clearly shows that it is alive and kickin'. If you are familiar with FRUiTS and you flip through GRMO you might think many of the outfits could come straight from the early 2000s - the colors, the layers, the combinations of items and of course the creativity! I`m more than happy to have discovered the mag and I hopt to be able to pick up more of it in the future.

GRMO is published irregularly, is represented on instagram @grmo_magazine and can be ordered online at https://follie.base.shop/.