Interview with Allure it got weird after Gwen Stefani was asked by an Asian reporter about the Harajuku era.
Jesa Marie Calaor, a Filipina American and senior editor at Allure, wrote in an article published Tuesday that during a 32-minute interview with Stefani — which was meant to promote the launch of her vegan beauty brand, GXVE Beauty — , she asked her ex NO. . I doubt the frontwoman learned anything from her days in Harajuku, when she adopted the styles and attitude of Tokyo’s avant-garde neighborhood. The question has been asked by other publications due to the criticism Stefani received years later for appropriating Japanese culture.
In response, “The Voice” judge defended this phase of her career, saying that she “was Japanese twice” in Calaor.
Fox via Getty Images
In 2004, Stefani released her first solo album, Love. Angel. The music. Baby” and promoted it with four Japanese backup dancers known as the Harajuku Girls, named after the young and stylish neighborhood. These women performed onstage with Stefani and acted as her entourage offstage. According to Time magazine, they were “contractually bound to speak Japanese only in public” and Stefani “named them—as if they were pets—’Love,’ ‘Angel,’ ‘Music,’ and ‘Baby’ after the album’s title They. .”
In 2008, Stefani launched her Harajuku Lovers perfume, in which she borrowed from the Japanese Harajuku subculture for imagery and marketing, and made the bottles look like Funko Pop replicas of Stefani and her backup dancers.
Stefani explained to Calaor that she was introduced to Japanese culture by her father, who worked at Yahama for 18 years and traveled frequently between California and Japan. Stefani’s father, who is Italian-American, returned from his travels “with stories of street performers impersonating Elvis and elegant women with dyed hair,” Calaor said.
“That was my Japanese influence,” Stefani told Calaor. “And this was a culture so steeped in tradition, yet so futuristic [with] so much attention to art and detail and discipline and it was fascinating to me.
Stefani had the opportunity to travel to the Harajuku neighborhood as an adult and fell in love with it.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m Japanese and I didn’t know that.’ … They are, you know.
Stefani later called herself a “super fan” of Japanese culture, before launching a defense of her critics.
“Self [people are] I’m going to criticize myself because I’m a fan of something beautiful and I’m sharing it, so I think it doesn’t feel right,” Stefani said. “I think it was a beautiful time of creativity… a ping-pong time between Harajuku culture and American culture. [It] It should be okay to take inspiration from other cultures, because if we’re not allowed, then that’s dividing people, right?
Calaor — who was accompanied by an Asian and Latino colleague — seemed puzzled by Stefani’s remarks.
After the interview, Calaor said she and her colleague were “left questioning what we heard. Maybe he misspoke? Again and again?”
“During our interview, Stefani stated twice that she was Japanese and once that she was ‘a little bit of an Orange County girl, a little bit of a Japanese girl, a little bit of an English girl,'” Calaor wrote.
Calaor later noted, “A rep for Stefani got in touch the next day, indicating that I misunderstood what Stefani was trying to convey. Allure later asked Stefani’s team for comment or clarification on the remarks, and they declined to provide a statement or participate in a follow-up interview.
HuffPost also reached out to Stefani for clarification.
Stefani then ended her interview by telling Allure that because of her upbringing in Anaheim, California, she not only identifies with Japanese culture, but also Hispanic and Latino cultures.
“The music, the way the girls wore their makeup, the clothes they wore, that was my identity,” she said. “Even though I’m Italian-American—Irish or whatever crazy thing I am—that’s what I became because those were my people, right?
To read more about Stefani’s interview — and Calaor’s thoughts on the exchange — head over to Allure.
