O-nii-kei (お兄系), Big Brother Style

News flash! According to a super-informative post by David Marx, “Big Brother Style” or O-nii-kei (お兄系) has replaced gyaru-o (ギャル男), which reigned as the Shibuya underground male look from 2003 to 2007. According to Marx:

Now these boys have grown up, abandoned the crazy face paint and garish clothing, and outfitted themselves with aviator glasses, fur-trimmed nylon parkas, buccaneer boots, poofy bronzed hair, and as much silver as could be possible worn on the human body. (Think hosts).

Marx also helpfully ties both o-nii-kei and gyaru-o to yankii culture, “the aesthetic canon for working class delinquent youth tastes since the 1970s.” Combining bad taste, delinquency and outrageousness, these male and female looks are an affront to mainstream commercial taste; however their brands are second only to Louis-Vuitton in sales at Osaka’s new department store Hankyu.

I also discovered a fellow Californian even more obsessed with Men’s Knuckle, Men’s Egg and other outre Japanese male fashion, Patrick Macias. For us still struggling to read Japanese, he shows and explains some of the key new Men’s Egg looks: casual, hard, adult and gorgeous. Macias is also editor-in-chief of a OtakuUSA. For some of the best magazine images and commentary, see his center guy and gyaru-o category.

For the record, none of my older brothers have ever been this hip!

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