Editorial Archive

Inside the Cyber Amusement Park

There is a photograph that circulates among archive hunters with particular persistence. It shows the interior of a shop in Harajuku, Tokyo, sometime around 1999: white and silver walls illuminated from behind, racks of clothes suspended on what appears to be a miniature roller coaster track, and at the centre of the frame, a working ferris wheel from which shoes hang as if part of a permanent, gently rotating display.