H Magazine March 1997
This week we will be continuing our deep dive of the late 90’s issues of H Magazine with a third issue from March 1997. These are the only three issues I have in my collection so far but they have been scanned in full and I plan on scanning more in the future. Last weeks issue had a lot of content to get through so I highly recommend considering being a paid subscriber to the site for full access to the magaZines. Without any more delegation lets jump into H Magazine March 1997!
In the previous issue from November 1996, I featured an advertisement for “Enemy Zero”, a video game developed by musician and game developer Kenji Eno, president of Warp Studios. The story behind this game is insane, after Eno had received many letters from blind fans of his games, Eno personally visited some of his visually impaired fans to get a better sense of how they could play actions games. The result of these learnings is “Real Sound: Kaze No Regret”, a game of sorts that is entirely reliant on audio and music and contains almost no visual contents. It’s a super interesting concept for a video game that features different endings for different decisions that occur throughout the game. Kenji Eno also worked with Sega to gift 1000 Sega Saturn consoles and copies of the game to visual impaired fans in Japan. If you are curious as to what the gameplay is like, I’ll include a link for you to get a sense.
First up for the fashion editorials we have “Girly & Beast” which features a familiar face of H Magazine, Japanese actress Mai Hosho. Shot by Shigeo Shidara, the photographs feature a fun juxtaposition of chic and masculine looks. In half the images Hosho wears heels, tights, and blouses, while the other half she wears button down shirts, ties, coats, and a pencil thin makeup mustache. The theme for the shoot was transience and unreasonableness and showed off the delicate, fragile aspects of her feminine side as well as the strong, slightly overworked, masculine side. I think the combination of styles, created by Yuki Mayama, is what I enjoy most about this peculiar editorial.
Up next we have one that I’ve been waiting to post for a while, actress Tamaki Ogawa meets Kosuke Tsumara of Final Home. Ogawa is another actress that appears many times in H Magazine most famous for her role in Hiroyuki Nakano’s “Samurai Fiction” from 1998. What I like most about this editorial is the clothing, from what I’ve seen, most of Kosuke Tsumara’s designs are somewhat androgynous and lean towards menswear but the clothing in this editorial is quite the opposite. The feminine style clothing worn by Ogawa is not typical for Tsumara but he does it very well. I love the use of thin lace type materials in the first look as well as the neutral pantone ambiance of the photos.
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