The Sea of Wishes ~ online portfolio of Meg Couch, fashion designer and illustrator

visual kei inspired fashions

(click to enlarge)

I started listening to Japanese rock music about ten years ago when a friend introduced me to the bands Luna Sea, X Japan, Malice Mizer, and Dir en grey: all bands that were part of the visual kei movement. I listened to their music, I visited their fan sites, and I fell in love. I adored the flamboyance and the androgyny of the bands' costumes and styling, and I even developed a weird hobby of showing pictures of them to classmates and teachers in my high school and having them guess whether these beautiful musicians were male or female. Of course, they were all men, but you couldn't always tell.

...Of course, I've grown out of that obsession over the years, but I still do enjoy the music, and I still appreciate visual kei as a style. I attempted to design a collection of illustrations inspired by visual kei once before, but I wasn't completely happy with it because I didn't let the inspiration fully manifest itself in my designs. I decided to try again this semester in my portfolio class, and I think that these designs are much better. I even made an album booklet as an alternative to my normal illustrations because I wanted to approach my figures as members of a band (d6) with their own album, and I'm even thinking about using the illustrations in a future website layout when I get tired of this one.