Does anyone remember Celebrity gyaru style? It flew quite a bit under the radar since it happened during the time that a lot of other styles happened to boom and truth be told, not a lot of gals could actually afford it. Celebrity gyaru back then emulated the style of famous female celebrities like Paris Hilton, Christina Aguilera, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears. While achieving the look was somewhat possible to do by focusing on key elements, it was a bit tougher to get your hands on high brand items for the sake of the style. It became pretty clear that Celebrity Gyaru was not just a style, but also a lifestyle (which can be said for a lot of the styles still hanging by a thread at this point).

Some Food For Thought

Celebrity Gyaru FAILED utterly and completely. If you can picture a rocket trying to lift off and swiftly crashing; then that’s pretty much what happened and here’s why:

• 2003 was still rightfully a very colorful gyaru era, so the other styles predominated more
• Literally no one could afford actual brand since 90% of people were primarily in high school
• Brand knock offs weren’t that easy to come by (if ALBA was hard to find as a knock off, so were high fashion brands from Europe and the US)

As for this post’s featured image, both covers are from 2003; BLENDA focused a lot of their content on celebrity gyaru before the blogger era hit. You can clearly see the differences (and why this style wasn’t a huge hit at the time).

Now, let’s shift to later events up to now in 2020:

• Ane Ageha became more popular and started showing more high fashion brands in a different way than BLENDA ever did.
  • Consequently, Ane Ageha became really popular with Japanese mainstream audiences.
• RADY came into play – a brand with excruciatingly high prices for the average Gyaru but with enough PR and Gal Models that encouraged the style (a small step into affording brand items).
• The blogger era comes by and rather than focusing on slightly obscure brands (i.e. FERNOPAA, TuTuHa, etc.), the focus moves towards more high fashion brands that are somewhat obtainable and trending within the blogger-verse.
•  Shortly after, the now SNS trend comes in where we not only see bloggers with high fashion items posting all about that #luxelifestyle but we also see current trending celebrities like Kylie Jenner, Hailey Baldwin, Gigi Hadid in the US and Twice, BlackxPink, Koda Kumi (a favorite in any fashion era, obviously), with styles that Japanese mainstream audiences want to adopt.
  • Something also fun to think about is that brand collaborations with bands and other celebrities was nowhere near as popular as it was until the later 2010’s. 
  • If you’ve noticed from certain still somewhat Gyaru models and users on Instagram, you’ll see them tag obscure brands with exorbitant prices. This is the right kind of obscure for most of Japanese mainstream.

P.S: Here’s an article from ViVi Magazine going over the different fashion trends within the Heisei era up to where we are now at the SNS trend (Japanese). 

And Here’s the Best (& Worst) Plot Twist I can Give you

Taking all of the above into consideration, it seems to be that Celebrity Gyaru is back. Sure, the style didn’t come back knocking down doors, turning heads, breaking necks, but it did piggyback onto the coattails of the current HypeBeast and SNS trend enough to break ground in Japan and make a bit of a comeback. Aside from newxEGG making a video a while back about celebrity gyaru lifestyle (best way I can think is a modern and slightly realistic MTV Cribs), here are a few ex-Gyaru models living this セレブーGAL lifestyle:

• Yunkoro
• Sayoko Ozaki
• Imai Sayaka
• Manya
• Nemoyayo

Last but not least, here’s the video I mentioned about セレブーGAL from newxEGG!