Globalization is the process of increasing interconnectedness among nations, cultures, and people. Which is supported and accelerated by technological developments. These interconnections can be seen through a concept known as Hybridization. Hybridization is the blending of cultures over time, that have blended from separate cultures. This blending occurs when one culture adopts another, and a great example of this is Gwen Stefani and her Harajuku Girls.
The Harajuku Girls were first imagined by Gwen when she took a trip to the city of Harajuku, Japan. She was amazed by the difference in the culture in Japan, and immediately fell in love with it's foreign nature. Of all the new cultural experiences she was fascinated in, she found a particular fashion style the most interesting. In Harajuku there is a group of teens who dress in brightly colored, and 'anime' like fashion, and they call themselves 'Fruits”. These fruits have started a wave of fashion in there city, and Gwen immediately loved it. She took this idea of 'Fruit fashion' and brought it over to America with her new musical movement that she calls “Harajuku Girls”. She garbed four young Japanese girls in a similar fashion and turned them into a marketable cultural product. This 'Fruit fashion' was now being sold in America as perfume, and clothing, and music, when it once was just simply a way of teens to express themselves. This hybridization of two cultures shows that foreign ideas and things are much more marketable when combined with something that our society is comfortable with, like Gwen Stefani.
(The 'Fruits' of Harajuku, Japan)
(Gwen's 'Harajuku Girls', America)
Gwen Stefani is a marketing wiz, she brought a cultural practice from Japan to America and blended it with music, and American fashion and now she is even richer and more successful for it. This is merely one example of how Globalization works and effects our culture and society indefinitely.
