Gorgeous covers of the Japanese magazine ‘Teen Look’ from the 1960s
When the Japanese decide to do something right, they really do it right.
The current case in point is the cover art that Satsuko Okamoto produced for the magazine Teen Look in the late 1960s. Her fresh and playful use of colour, pattern, and symmetry contributes to her notable and distinctive body of work, one that any young graphic designer would do well to imitate.
There is very little information in English out there about Teen Look or Okamoto, which is a shame. I was able to discover that the magazine started in the spring of 1968 because of a brief snippet of text on Google Books I found from a 1969 issue of New Scientist in which they were making fun of the poor English discovered in a Japanese trade magazine at the Frankfurt Book Fair. To be fair, the English is pretty bad.
Here’s the text: “In April, 1968 started the Teen Look, a weekly for girl students of junior and senior high schools, which met with favourable acceptance as the magazine presenting sound dialogue between the adolescent girls delicate in sentiment and the parent….”
Unfortunately, the excerpt ends there.
There are lots of Okamoto’s Teen Look covers on Pinterest, always with the same identifiers: Teen Look, Satsuko Okamoto, 1960s cover…. In other words, I don’t have a lot of confidence that some of these covers don’t creep into the 1970s, but I don’t know Japanese.
I did figure out that the nice serif integers to the left of the price in yen (usually 80) signify the date. You can see the numbers in certain runs progress from 2/11 to 2/18 to 2/25 and so on. Obviously if it was a weekly, the dates would be advancing by seven days each time.
Just look at the December 2nd, 1980 issue—front and centre—where a red-haired girl in a moss green knit hat balances a rosy apple on her head and puffs calmly on a cigarette. It’s pure proto-Harajuku surrealism, captured a good decade before that term would mean anything to anyone. The lines are tight, the palette is candy-coated, and that deadpan expression says everything. Flip around the others and you’ve got everything from New Romantic big collars to butterfly-winged kimono pageantry that looks like a lost collaboration between Erté and Yellow Magic Orchestra.
One of the strongest covers, though, has to be the January 1st issue, that electric bubblegum-pink backdrop behind the big-eyed girl in a prim black frock, cradling a doll that mirrors her exact look. It’s like stepping into an anime dream directed by John Waters—too sweet to be innocent, too composed to be naïve. And then there’s the skater girls in rainbow-striped scarves and bell-bottoms on the February 11th cover, hurtling through a frozen moment in space like psychedelic Olympians from a parallel Shōwa universe. Forget Vogue. Teen Look was operating in an entirely different dimension.
Honestly, I’d trade the entire run of Tiger Beat for a single one of these covers.
