Explaining the See-through Skirt hoax
27/01/10 17:34
Printed panty skirts revealed as a hoax Images flooding e-mails are creation of computer program But Japanese porn could become new Western fashion trend
NICK MCCABE-LOKOS STAFF REPORTER – THE TORONTO STAR You’d think people just wouldn’t buy into a prank as transparent as see-through skirts.
But buy they did, or at least they tried.
Images of skirts purportedly printed to look a whole lot more breezy than they are have been widely e-mailed, written about online and the subject of at least one newspaper story in recent weeks.
They have become the latest trend that never was.
“They (the pictures) are quite common in Japan. There are a lot of cheap porno magazines that use them,” Kjeld Duits, 43, says in an interview from Ashia, near Osaka, Japan, where he works as a journalist and runs a street fashion/trend Web site called japanesestreets.com.
“The only time you see these scenes are in photographs in porno magazines. There’s nothing like this in the street,” Duits says.
The magazines use a computer graphics program to combine the image of a skirted woman with another wearing just underwear. The end result looks as if the skirt is see-through.
According to Duits, the magazines will usually claim to have taken the pictures using a special camera lens that allows them to shoot through clothes.
The pictures popped up in e-mails in Canada in their non-porno context accompanied by the following message: “What you see below are not see-through skirts. They are actually prints on the skirts to make it look as if the panties are visible and are the current rage in Japan.”
That explanation was evidently enough for the Sunday Mail newspaper in Queensland, Australia, to run a story headlined, “A Cheeky Skirt” that claimed the garments were all the rage in Tokyo.
Adding confusion among fashion followers are several eye-popping precedents, notably by Britain’s Vivienne Westwood and France’s Jean Paul Gaultier.
Westwood is famous for printing nipples and pubic hair on fleshtone catsuits while Gaultier’s repertoire includes trompe l’oeil T-shirts with rippling abs for men.
Snopes.com, a Web site dedicated to picking apart doctored images and other urban legends, had this to say about the Japanese hoax:
“We have yet to find a Japanese source … containing information about – or even mention of – these supposed `see-through’ skirts,” the Web site says.
“In all the example photographs provided … the images of the panties line up perfectly with the actual positioning of the skirt-wearers’ derrieres and legs, indicating at the very least that these pictures were very carefully posed,” according to snopes.com.
Duits agrees. “It’s very obvious that they are not printed.”
An enlargement of one of the images shows the curves of the woman’s bottom extending through the strap of her handbag. The knuckle portion of the woman’s index finger is also cut off. Both suggest that the image was altered.
Duits says dozens of people wanting to import the skirts have approached him for a connection to the manufacturer. That’s left him the task of explaining that the skirts don’t exist, not even as a kink item.
“I get so many e-mails from all over the world,” he says.
Pedro Orrego, producer of Citytv’s program Sextv, has seen the skirt pictures and draws a connection between people believing they exist and the Western stereotype of the oversexed Japanese man.
“I think we tend to think of Japan as kind of the exotic `other.’ And for some reason they have this reputation in the West of being over the top kinky people,” says Orrego, who in September travelled to Japan to do a story on the phenomenon of pornographic animation and sex comics.
He says there are a number of factors that play into that stereotype.
Japan’s censorship laws prohibit the depiction of pubic hair.
“In order to titillate they have to go about it in a different way,” Orrego explains.
The absence of the Judeo-Christian conception of sin also contributes to the view that sex is natural, he says. It also allows a freer sense of fantasy.
“But the stuff that gets imported is the crazy wild stuff, which is actually a very small fraction of the over-all output of Japan,” says Orrego.
All of that contributes to an atmosphere in which pictures of Japanese women wearing fake see-through skirts would be accepted as the real deal, he says.
And Duits, the trendspotter, just may have heard the first bit of proof that the fascination surrounding the skirts will eventually boil down to Western demands and tastes.
After explaining they were a hoax to an Israeli importer, that man decided to just start making the skirts himself.
“Who knows, maybe after this they will become the next big thing,” says Duits.
From here.