Bikkuri Project

The Japanese are known for having a deep appreciation for their four unique seasons. They express this appreciation through two time honored methods: haiku and ugly h!p costumes. You may find one of those to be an unusual method to commemorate the seasons, but you’ll just have to trust me and my extensive knowledge of Japanese culture on this one. Haiku really are supposed to have a seasonal theme.

When Autumn (aki) rolls around, things start to get a bit chilly, but that won’t stop C-ute! They don’t even let the fact that mustard yellow looks good on absolutely no one slow them down. While Maimi’s plaid short-shorts may be fashionable, they do nothing to protect her rear from the brisk breezes of fall, so she has attached a fuzzy green butt-warmer. It is practical as well as fashionable; doubling as protective padding should she slip on some fallen leaves and land on her ass. From what I hear, it was quite cheap too. She said she found it in a garbage can in a nice little neighborhood called Sesame Street. Say Maimi, next time you’re there can you ask about my friend Oscar? I haven’t heard from him for a while, and I’m starting to get worried.

Next up, Rika Ishikawa is looking festive for the holiday season, Winter (fuyu). According to a recent interview, her motto is, “if less is more, then more is even more than that, and that’s better, right?” She explained that she started with a nice beaded evening gown, but it just wasn’t enough. It needed something. It needed to be festooned with gigantic poofy bows, taffeta flounces of alternating colors, and a couple of leftover tartan kilts from her latest photobook “Alo Hello Rika Ishikawa in Scotland.” To finish off, she looked for a necklace, but they were all tangled together in a clumpy mess. “More is more” she thought, humming to herself and fastening the whole thing around her neck.

Ah Spring (haru). Here Ayaya demonstrates that nothing says ‘Spring’ quite like a gigantic butterfly perched on your head (for best results butterfly should be larger than head). How nice to see that she’s been taking fashion tips from Rika and has chosen to festoon one of the legs of her pants in floppy multicolored bows which doesn’t look ridiculous at all. It looks so not ridiculous that I almost didn’t notice that her shiny silver leather pants (there’s four words that should never appear together in a sentence) seem to have been violently sprayed with blood recently. You know, between the gore and the butterfly, the ruffly almost-vest isn’t even worth commenting on.

On a hot Summer (natsu) day, there’s nothing better than a nice dip in the pool. How very clever of Maki to wear what is clearly a bikini directly over her old T-shirt. Throw on a few belts and some red streamers and the whole audience is fooled into thinking that she’s wearing a concert costume. The protruding fringe of her bloomers making it look like she’s one of those little kids who wears a diaper under her swimsuit is a small price to pay to be able to hit the pool immediately after the concert. Sure, most people in this situation would wear the swimsuit under their clothes, but Maki is being a non-conformist, and you’ve got to respect her for that.

I’ll end with my own haiku.

Is Rika crazy?

I think she wants to eat me

I’m afraid. Send help!

Today’s costume hall of shame can be summed up in one word, a word which I personally feel should never be associated with Hello Project in any way. “Yeeeehaw!!!”

To start us off, Berryz, dressed as proper cowboys. At first glance, it’s not so bad. I’m not a fan of cowboy costumes being worn by anyone other than actual cowboys or 4-year-olds on Halloween, but I guess these are sort of cute. What really bugs meare the tiny hats. They’re supposed to be cute, but they remind me of clown hats. You know how clowns always have accessories that are the wrong size, right? Oversized shoes and bowties, cars and hats that are too small, etc. Worse, the clown with the tiny cowboy hatis notthe happy fun clown. He’s the sad kind of clown. He’s the clown that’s always getting pied in the face, or,at therodeo, chased by the raging bull. While I worry that the Ghengis Khan song is some kind of cruel joke on the Berryz, let’s not demote them to “sad clown” just yet.

Excuse me. Miss Running Deer? I hate to break this to you, but you’re not actually an indian priestess. You’re really a Japanese girl named Maki Goto. You see, there is no real tribe of Native Americans who make their traditional clothing out of sparkly brown camouflage fabric. Try to take it easy on the peyote next time, okay?

Ayaya is hereby crowned Queen of the Rodeo! She’s not just wearing a costume inspired by rodeo queens: I’m worried that she might have assaulted an actual rodeo queen and stolen her dress before this photo was taken. Or maybe she only stole half of a dress and made the other half herself, because I’m pretty sure this is actually the right and left half of two similar, but slightly different dresses sewn together. The hem is way shorter on one side, and there’s a seam down the middle. Good thing this outfit couldn’t get any worse.

Hoo! This little black number would be hot, if she hadn’t retained the heavily fringed arm warmers. At least all of the fringe sort of blended in with the equally fringe-happy rodeo queen dress. With all of the fringing concentrated on her arms, at best it looks like she’s wearing a silly minicape, and at worst it looks like she has a very serious arm-hair problem.

Well, that there’s perti’near it for the costume hall of shame rodeo. I’m gonna go ride off into one’a them sunsets now. Yeeeeehaw!

I never thought that costumes would be in this feature based on their color rather than design flaws, but today I have been proven wrong. When a group of idols has been around as long as h!p has, they start to run the risk of repeating the same costumes twice. No doubt, the designers rack their brains before every concert, trying to come up with something they haven’t done yet, but when the idea well is really running dry, they have to use a less than optimal color pallet. Surely though, they couldn’t have been desperate enough that their only option was to use these particular colors together.

Orange fluff and brown velour. On idols. Idols are supposed to look bright and sparkly on stage, aren’t they? Well, this is whatever the opposite of bright and sparkly is. The brown is just horribly drab and muddy, and while the orange adds color, it also adds several metric tons of clash. Ewww. Don’t ever do this again! Do you hear me Country Musume?!

Ack! No no no!! Bad Country Musume! Bad! I see that you have lost the brown, which is good, but you have expanded the orange, and that is not good at all. This isn’t just orange, it’s traffic cone, life-jacket, construction worker vest ORANGE. It’s not that I hate the color orange, but costumes that are entirely this shade of it are downright eye-smarting. Very bright colors are like hot sauce, good in moderation and as seasoning for other things, but painful in large doses and by itself. Despite the potential risk to my retinas, I have studied these costumes further and come to the conclusion that the color is just a clever ploy to distract us from how poorly-made they are. They don’t really seem to fit the girls, and the whole thing just looks unforgivably cheap. It could have been worse I guess. These could have been the costumes for Mikan.

Unrelated note time! To cleanse your soul of orangeness, please examine this preview picture from Sayumi’s upcoming photobook. Once again, I am stunned by how flipping beautiful this girl is.

Since more and more bad costumes seem to keep piling up (and I swear, I’m trying to be lenient), The Costume Hall of Shame has left me with many questions. Mostly, they are along the lines of “Why??” and “Are they blind??” (the answers to which are “see the answer to question 2″ and “yes”), but I often find myself left with questions that are more difficult to answer than these two. Perhaps you will have more luck with them than I have.

What the hell is on Maki’s face?

What the hell is on Rika’s head? Is the costume a homage to the famous Princess Leia/gold bikini scene from Star Wars? Is Rika a fan of Star Wars or is she just hoping to appeal to Star Wars geeks in the audience?

Is Ayaya trying to appeal to Renaissance fair geeks in the audience, or is she actually on her way to slay a dragon?

If you have to take a second look to make sure a girl is wearing an actual costume underneath her boas, is she wearing too many boas? Is there such a thing as too many boas in the h!p world?

How about too many plaids? Is that why Yossie is so angry here?

Did Sayu just realize she forgot to pull her napkin out of her shirt-front after her lunch break? Does she think it’s okay to leave it that way because her napkin happened to match her bloomers? Why is she even wearing bloomers? Is that why Yossie is so angry?

Where will Maki’s crazy crochet-happy grandmother strike next!?!? (just try to tell me that this costume didn’t start out life as an afghan or table cloth made by an insane octogenarian)

So far, I have declared war on fuzzballs, marching band uniforms, and excessive fabric. Today the Costume Hall of Shame congratulates bustles on joining that prestigious list. The bustles’ unforgivable sin can be explained very easily: They make your ass look huge on purpose! Really, there’s not a whole lot more to it, but if you ask any girl, she’ll probably agree that that’s enough to have bustles and those who design them condemned to hell.

Ai-chan “Yeah, this feathery bustle is awesome!”
Reina “Just shut up Ai! We look like huge-assed ostriches, and your strutting is making it worse”
Ai-chan *cries*

But there’s something worse than attaching a bustle to the back of your skirt: attaching a bustle to the back of your shorty-shorts. Let’s look at Yuko Nakazawa demonstrating in some poor quality screen shots (sorry). This might just be one of the least flattering looks that the h!p wardrobe department has come up with. Miss Hotness looks like Miss Chunky, and that’s not okay. That’s mostly the sparkly silver unitard’s fault though. As though the sparkling silver unitard wasn’t adding enough pounds, they have attached a cascade of golden poofy fabric to her rear. It’s like they were trying to make her a pretty formal dress, but they got lazy and stopped halfway through. How much better would this outfit have looked if they had continued the skirt all the way around? As it is now it’s the reverse mullet of costumes: Party in the front and business in the back (and ugly all around).

The costume Hall of Shame theme for today (if you didn’t read the title is…)

When Fabric Attacks!!!

Yes, fabric attacks have been on the rise in Hello Project. It starts with the idea “hey! We can have them wear one costume over another skimpier costume, and then they can change really quickly mid-show!” It’s a good idea in theory, but sometimes the costume designers seem to get so excited about the sexy 2^nd costume that they forget that the idol is going to have to appear onstage in the first one. They start whipping around the layers of fabric, and soon the singer is more cocooned and bloated-looking than a silk worm. Let’s look at Goto Maki, who I’m beginning to suspect decided to leave h!p solely because of the wardrobe choices in her latest concert tour.

I realize that she’s going for a “period” look, but good lord. There’s more fabric on her right now than I have on my entire bed (and my bedroom is really cold!). The impression I’m getting is less “regal French courtesan” and more “regal French jellyfish”.

Oh come on! Were they even trying to make this look like an outfit and not a large blanket that’s been awkwardly bunched up and pinned onto Maki? Wait. I see what really happened here. Granny Goto has seen the shockingly indecent clothes her granddaughter has been wearing in photos lately, and so she set out to crochet the largest and bulkiest shroud she could in order to protect Maki’s modesty. I can say with confidence that her modesty is well protected here. Pull the hood down a bit, and that could be Tsunku under there and you wouldn’t know the difference!

Well, that’s all for this time. Sorry I’ve been picking on Maki so much, but I really think that these outfits deserve it. Now that you’ve seen what excess fabric can do if unchecked, please remember that if you see any fabric behaving suspiciously, do not panic! Contact the proper authorities and…

Aaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!! Watch out Ai-chan!!! There’s something climbing up your shoulder and I think it’s heading for your face!!!!