The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

Just as the Aoki Sydney Powerhouse Museum exhibition was about
Tokyo street fashion, Bevan Chuang and I intended our show to
concentrate on Japan. This did not fit, apparently, with the criteria of the
Museum. *
To make our concept relevant, according to the Museum’s
parameters, the emphasis was therefore shifted by the publicity department
from our proposed Japanese angle towards an Auckland-based hype. While
I am eternally grateful to the staff at Auckland Museum for giving us the
opportunity to run this show, and particularly for the immense support that
we were given in regard to advertisement, which included radio, television,
newspaper and magazine journalism and a massive poster and billboard
campaign, this decision to market Loli-Pop as a local craze was extremely
problematic. While it supports my observation that, as late as 2007,
mainstream society was still largely ignorant about the Japanese Lolita
subculture, which was advantageous to Chuang and myself in that we were
seen as experts on a cutting edge, current trend, this misperception called
for difficult and embarrassing times when interviewers, on radio and
television, repeatedly questioned the two of us, at times during live
broadcast, about where Lolita were “hanging out” and where the Auckland
“hotspots” might be. This situation was worsened by the Museum’s choice
of subtitle: “A Downtown Auckland View on Japanese Street Fashion”.
* Bevan and I did not agree with this argument. The Auckland Museum is not the same as Te Papa,
the National Museum, which promotes New Zealand content (although even Te Papa ran the
Pompeii exhibition). The Arts of Asia gallery establishes the fact that the Institution often looks
outside this nation when selecting works for display.
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