![]() I am so not the right person to even talk about this. So of all the terms to be decidedly obsolete, it’s the universally relevant one. ![]() The catch is that, while this still has modern applicability, people associate the term with the first type of style I mentioned. Today, it’s still totally applicable terminology for bands like Versailles, Megaromania, and virtually anything Kisaki is involved in. Back in the day, it referred to bands like Aliene Ma'riage, Lareine, and virtually anything Kisaki was involved in. Yeah, kote kei has really changed over the years, but the central concept is that this is stuff you totally would not wear in daily life. They wear costumes that are based more in fantasy and history than street fashion. This basically refers to bands whose image is really over-the-top and theatrical. Okay so I actually don’t hate this one and I do find it helpful. The modern equivalent to oshare is basically SuG, Paradeis, Dog in the PWO, etc… but even those bands are all quite different from each other and need better terminology than just “oshare kei.” Street clothes and bright colors are universally accepted aesthetics for all sorts of bands. However, these days, it’s all sort of blended. We were just too used to being waaaaay to dark for that. Back in my day, oshare kei was this thing you totally secretly liked, but pretended was untouchable because all the pink and happiness. Fuck, I am so guilty of this in high school and I entirely blame Panic Channel for that:īut you know what? It’s 2013 and we’ve transcended. Incidentally, a lot of “how to dress oshare” type of advice turned out to really be “wear a bunch of colorful shit and fluff your hair up.” Which I guess is fine if that’s how you want to dress. However, when the term first popped up, it was referring to bands that looked like this: These bands weren’t really “normal” enough to not be visual, but they were different enough from the visual kei norm to get their own special terminology. They tended to make happy-sounding music with pop punk and ska influences. Back in the early 2000’s, a bunch of bands started popping up wearing colorful looks based on street style with fluffy visual kei hairstyles and lighter-but-still-visual-looking makeup. It’s a pedantic shitfest and it makes no sense.īut you’ll still hear these terms used, so I digress. On top of all that, visual kei fans can’t collectively agree on which of those are even legitimate categorizations. Fast forward ten years, we’re operating on very very ill-defined terminology that hardly applies to bands today at all. The problem is, bands are REALLY different now and the definitions of those terms were shitty at best to begin with. ![]() All of them are still being defined and used in basically the same way today. All of these terms were in use already when I got into visual kei. To preface this, I’ve been into visual kei for about 10 years now. The existing terminology I’m going to go over is this: Oshare Kei, Kote (or Kote Kote) Kei, Angura Kei, Eroguro Kei, and Nagoya Kei. However, I think it’s easier to be modern and analytical in our choices if we discard outdated ideas. I’m guilty of off-handedly using those terms, so it’s partially my fault that this perpetuates. I also want to make the second half of this post about the kind of language that actually is helpful and relevant to describe modern visual kei style, even if it’s not special vk-only terminology. ![]() I am going to go over what those terms are *generally* accepted to mean, but also why using them can be problematic. This makes them a really poor way to convey ideas with any specificity. I tend to use those terms out of habit and convenience, but at their core, they tend to be outdated and ill-defined. ![]() So I did receive a request to do a post about terminology, but I don’t want to make a post rehashing the difference between oshare kei, kote kei, angura kei, etc. ![]()
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