(Photo: Jason Wishnow)
That veggie burger wasn’t the only thing that brought bonkers crowds to the Lower East Side over the weekend. For one very kawaii afternoon, the neighborhood turned into Harajuku and Allen Street was Takeshita Dori as Tokyo Rebel, a beacon of Japanese punk, Goth and Lolita fashion, reopened to frilly fanfare.
After its lease expired nearly two years ago, Tokyo Rebel closed its Avenue B store and launched an arduous search for a new location while continuing to sell brands like SEXPOT ReVeNGe, Victorian maiden, Innocent World, and Morrigan New York online.
Saturday it reopened at 158 Allen Street in conjunction with Baby, the Stars Shine Bright, a renowned Tokyo shop specializing in the Rococo Lolita look (its sub-brand Alice and the Pirates trends more Goth). The reopening — preceded by a party offering the requisite Victorian tea sandwiches — drew a line down the block that looked like something out of Fruits.
“We were working as fast as we could to complete purchases, but people were coming faster than we could ring them up!” the store wrote on its blog. “This community seems to have grown even larger in New York since we closed our previous store.”
Has it? Aside from the stray steampunk, we didn’t even know these characters existed until this brought them out of the woodwork. But click through the slideshow below to see these Tokyo rebels in all of their manga-nificent glory.