Miyuki Kaneko: The 1960s—Three Kinds of Magic

2024/06/13

I was a child who loved looking through encyclopedias. In the "F" section under "French Cinema," there was a still from "Breathless" (À bout de souffle), Jean-Luc Godard's masterpiece. Jean Seberg in a "Herald Tribune" T-shirt and Jean-Paul Belmondo, looking like a hoodlum with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, walking down the Champs-Élysées. In an instant, I thought, "This is it!" That was my first encounter with the 1960s.

The name of my shop, "Anouchka," was taken from "Anouchka Films," the production company Godard founded with his wife and muse, actress Anna Karina. In "Pierrot le Fou," Anna delivers a monologue: "What should I do? What do I want to do?" She was me. I didn't know what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be. After graduating from university, I started working as a writer, but there was a gap between what clients wanted and what I wanted to write. I wanted to move from an intangible business where I couldn't see faces to a tangible one. I was also exhausted by life in the city center. It was then that a friend invited me to visit Kokubunji. In that casual town in Musashino, dripping with greenery, I took a deep breath. I caught a faint scent of the remnants of 1960s counterculture. In 1987, "Anouchka" opened in the Kokubunji Mansion (which, coincidentally, was completed in 1968). Since then, I have been dealing in British vintage clothing and accessories from the 1960s.

Why the 60s? The second reason is Twiggy. I saw her on TV when she came to Japan in 1967. A skinny, British-born model. When Japanese women saw Twiggy in a miniskirt, they all shortened their hemlines at once. Twiggy was a social phenomenon.

And the Rolling Stones. In 1972, NHK's "Young Music Show" broadcast the 1969 Hyde Park concert. As a junior high school student, I was instantly captivated, and from that day on, my "pilgrimage" to the Stones began. I was also mesmerized by the fashion of their glamorous girlfriends. The magic cast by Godard, Twiggy, and the Stones has yet to be broken. This January, I published "Anouchka’s ’60s-’70s British Vintage-topia: Deciphering London Fashion through A to Z 31 Keywords and Visuals." It chronicles the path I have dedicated to 1960s fashion and culture. It is not merely nostalgia, but a journey to that era as a discovery.