As we all might have noticed, the 31 year old manga and anime series JOJO’s Bizarre Adventure has had a big link with fashion ever since its early drafts. The creator Hirohiko Araki is a huge fan of high fashion and we can clearly see the influence of high fashion houses in his very own designs, such as Versace, Moschino, Missoni and other various brands that were popular in the 80s when the series began. Following that, world’s best selling high fashion house Gucci collaborated with Araki in 2011 where they hosted a whole exhibition showing Gucci designs with Araki’s art style on his characters. The mangaka even featured a spinoff manga issue where one of the characters, Rohan Kishibe, goes to the Gucci house in Italy and carries on with his bizarre adventure.
Araki is known for drawing his characters in « bizarre » clothing, and shows a unique aesthetic for their outfits. Let’s take for example the main characters Jotaro, Josuke and Giorno who happen to have a school uniform as their default outfit in their main parts. Araki somehow puts a unique twist to the main character’s uniform which makes them recognizable and different from other characters going to the same school.
Araki takes a big inspiration from fashion illustrations and sketches when drawing his characters, and that led them to the famous trend of « JoJo posing » which actually comes from models posing in peculiar poses in fashion magazines to show off their clothes.
Not only has Araki included fashion posing in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, but he also named some characters as fashion references. In the 6th part of the series, Stone Ocean, the majority of the main characters are named after big fashion industry names. Examples are « Ermes Costello » which comes from the French high fashion house Hermès, we also have « Emporio Alniño » which is a reference to Italian fashion house Emporio Armani and also « Narciso Anasui, » a reference to American fashion designers Narciso Rodriguez » and Anna Sui.
Araki included a lot of fashion inspiration into his works and somehow created an iconic fashion sense unique to his characters, which by itself inspired a whole lot of new designers to create fashion based on the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure series.
Here’s a JoJo inspired fashion photoshoot.
Jnaina Benaissa
JET Press Team
