Chain of inspiration: A look at the visual language and fashion in Sailor Moon
On seifuku, shojo manga, and Thierry Mugler villains.
A side quest I’ve indulged in, on and off, for the last few years is design. Diving into the history and trends, but more interestingly, identifying what I like and why I like it.
One aesthetic I always return to is Sailor Moon. Specifically, the ‘80s City Pop airbrushed + delicate backgrounds, paired with the high contrast and expressive figures of manga. Watching Sailor Moon is like a polite standoff between character and background.
This weekend I went a little deeper and studied the fashion influence on the show and its creator, Naoko Takeuchi. If there’s one thing that’s reinforced over and over again in my design research, it’s that fashion is always doing more work than it initially lets on.
More about Naoko Takeuchi
Takeuchi was born in 1967 in Kofu, Japan and attended an all-girls high school where she joined the astronomy and manga clubs. She earned a chemistry degree, then became a licensed pharmacist, a career she (thankfully!!!!!!!!) abandoned.
Her first major work was Codename: Sailor V in 1991. When Toei Animation approached her about an anime adaptation, she expanded the concept so that Sailor Venus became part of a team, and Sailor Moon began serialization in Nakayoshi magazine later that year. It ran until 1997 and the anime ran 200 episodes.
Inspiration #1: The uniform
In the 1920s, Japanese girls’ schools started adopting what they called the seifuku: a sailor-style uniform modeled after European naval dress.
The uniform quickly became standardized…and also synonymous with compliance and the “correct” performance of girlhood.
In the 1970s, left-wing youth movements called for abolishing school uniforms entirely, characterizing the seifuku as a symbol of authoritarianism. Sukeban girl gangs responded by modifying their uniforms, making skirts longer and shortening the tops.
Read more: SUKEBAN - Japan’s 70s Delinquent Girl Gangs
Takeuchi wore a sailor uniform (men at sea, not Tiara action) to her all-girls high school in Kofu. When she created the Sailor Guardians, she kept the structural elements of the seifuku, like the collar and pleated skirt, but added Sailor-specific (Tiara action, not men at sea) elements like tiaras, bows, colored trim and boots. The boots!!
Inspiration #2: The face
The other visual element Takeuchi leaned on was a way of drawing faces. Shojo manga, the genre Sailor Moon belongs to, is manga made for and marketed to girls. Its visual language includes non-rigid panel layouts, a focus on emotion and relationships and a very specific look for eyes.
In the late 1950s, a manga artist named Macoto Takahashi started drawing female figures with big eyes and very slender proportions, presented almost like fashion illustrations.
From there, eye design got even more elaborate with elongated lashes and this sort of glittering iris effect.
In Western comics, emotion is usually readable across the whole face. In Shōjo Manga, it lives almost entirely in the eyes.
Read more: The Origins of Shōjo Manga
Inspiration #3: The runway
The villains in Sailor Moon are often dressed in almost exact replications of ‘90s haute couture, which was a deliberate choice from Takeuchi, a huge follower of high fashion.
In s2e24, Koan, a villain of the Black Moon Clan, wore a multi-layered tutu skirt over a semi-sheer catsuit. This suit was directly lifted from Mugler’s FW ‘92 collection. The look is bar for bar.
Another famous pull is Princess Serenity’s white gown from Christian Dior’s SS ‘92 collection.
Takeuchi was on her own side quest of design inspiration 30 years ago, and made something new out of all of it. Now that something new is what I keep returning to when I’m trying to figure out what I like and why. Just tuggin’ on a chain of inspiration!
Hmmmm. So based on your excellent research, I’d most definitely be a villain. Cuz, you know, 90s haute couture.🙃