Austerity and Style

We in the West aren’t very good at finding rainbows in the dark clouds of economic hardship. We associate austerity with scary things: grinding 19th-century or 1930s-style poverty, Iranian tailors or the frightening Mrs. Danvers from Hitchcock’s “Rebecca.” A quick Google of the term austerity chic turns up references to Balenciaga, Prada and Chanel: chic, sure, but — with four-figure price tags — hardly austere.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. To find a different approach, let’s turn to Japan — the advanced nation with the longest recession in recent memory, where property prices have been sinking gently since the early 1990s, and where austerity evokes local traditions of restrained, elegant beauty.

A range of Japanese lifestyle magazines — Ku:nel, Sotokoto, Lingkaran, Kurashi No Techo and Tennen Seikatsu — is currently painting a much more positive and relaxed picture of austerity, drawing on Japan’s traditions of egalitarianism and thrift, as well as the post-recessionary popularity of its Slow Life and Slow Food trends. These magazines promote the idea that there’s virtue and utility — but also beauty, pleasure and natural sensuality — in life after affluence.

One benefit of faltering economic growth is environmental, and the current editions of the bimonthlies Ku:nel and Kurashi No Techo both feature extensive greenery. Ku:nel (the title means “eating and sleeping”) focuses on English gardens, while Kurashi No Techo (”Notebooks of Beautiful Life”) looks at rice soup, hiking in the mountains and the Purple magazine founder Elein Fleiss’ simple wardrobe. Lingkaran, meanwhile, this month investigates home as a life base, organic cuisine, homemade bread and ecologically friendly ways of cleaning clothes.

Kurashi No Techo, currently celebrating the 60th anniversary of its founding by Yasuji Hanamori, set the template for the Slow Magazine genre in Japan. In some ways it remains the most radical title: Hanamori made it a principle not to accept advertising in case it biased his consumer reports, and he once wrote in a poem:

When our lives and corporate profits clash, we will overturn the corporation.
When our lives and the government’s thinking clash, we will overturn the government.