Bulletin Board

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01

Throughout the mid-1980's, Japanese department store PARCO experimented with increasingly abstract and, some say, visionary ad campaigns. Led by outlandish fashion photographer Kazumi Kuragami, PARCO released a series of increasingly bizarre television commercials - the most notorious of which featured the famed cinema diva Faye Dunaway eating an entire boiled egg in silence. As was au courant at the time, PARCO often commissioned ambient in-store music to accompany its campaigns. This practice paralleled the emergence of Japanese Street Wear - a style of clothing featuring boxy silhouettes and bold colors popularized by designers like Rei Kawakubo, also known as Comme des Garçons. Ever the trendsetter, Kuragami decided to commission the obscure and somewhat heavy-handed German/Japanese jazz improv duo SynthundSax to produce a series of looping audio installations to accompany a new line of women's clothing by the heretofore unknown designer REDACTED. His efforts were ultimately proven to be almost too successful. Shoppers overcome by emotion could be seen lying down and weeping in the store. The resulting bedlam was heavily covered in the Japanese press - but the fervor did not result in many sales, largely due to the impracticality of REDACTED's designs, which featured pounds of itchy, unwieldy fabric, working electric lights, and a series of cumbersome and dangerously heavy metal hats.