Fashion and style magazines create styles, featuring certain brands which are sold in certain channels (as for example Marui Department Store, that features a lot of brands that are promoted in the magazine CanCam). Instead of only the brands being associated with a certain style, the department store is associated with a style/magazine that created/promotes it. This raises the interesting question, who are the girls who shop/buy/read the style of a certain department store (opposed to just a magazine).If you take this one level higher (abstract) you end up with magazines promoting certain lifepaths that lead to a certain social mobility (or a style that thrives by the absence of the latter). All this is again connected to the division of labor, gender roles, and to the discrimination (in a western sense, if we take the cultural relativism argument seriously) of women in domestic life and the working place (but again, check please Office ladies and salaried men, for a more sophisticated account on gender division and labor in Japanese big corporations).
So, what really supports the high demand for fashionable clothing and "acceptable" outfits (also, at least not rejected) by the other sex, is the clearly defined and recreated gender roles. The ability of a woman to get a husband with a high paying job is treated like an asset that can be built up. But more on that later. I am working now on a model that allows the integration of my three-level luxury marketing model with the role of magazines and subcultures in Japan. It will support my argument that reading certain magazines can limit/enhace your choice of lifestyle paths (and therefore upward social mobility).
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