A few days ago, Fashionably Geek’s Punk Princess tees post reminded me of this alt Princess Jasmine shirt I picked up in Japan. This one is probably pushing the envelope just a little harder than the designs they featured, what with the electrical tape on the nipples and all.. (Thom actually advised me not to wear this to Tokyo Disney because he thought it might be a touch disrespectful – I wore an ACDCRag shirt from Harajuku instead – but only out of respect for IP ownership!)

  One of the interesting things I noticed in Asia was the different treatment of familiar properties – Disney, especially Alice in Wonderland, Mario, even Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. Some of these were properly licensed items designed for the tastes of a different market, such as an Alice in Wonderland line at Uniqulo. Others, particularly in Taipei, were pretty clearly from the Wild West (East?) of copyright use.. which is to say, they were pretty clearly not officially licensed.

On both of my Asia trips last year I failed at capturing shop windows and retail displays (in some areas, most shops will have signs prohibiting it). I didn’t get any of Uniqlo’s Alice stuff, but you can see some in this Diskingdom post . I think some of these may be available to order online as well. I did not get much at all to convey the depth of Taipei’s night palaces of crazy capitalism…  I did happen to catch Colonel Sanders and Ronald McDonald getting violent on a tee shirt in a Taiwan night market shop, and I grabbed one shop snap as I walked by a shop that didn’t want me taking its picture on Takeshita street on my first (work) trip to Tokyo.

I didn’t do any better a photographing shops on my second Japan trip, but I did grab the tee from ACDC Rag, and the Disobey Princess Jasmine from.. the same shop I snuck the photo at on the previous trip.

Noticeably absent from both my photographs and my purchases: a tee shirt featuring Snow White doing a line of coke that I saw in Dogenzaka. Let’s just say there are standards.

After browsing Fashionably Geek’s post on Sunday, I decided to wear the Jasmine shirt out to take photos at Trinity Skyline Trail in Dallas – there may or may not be a post coming later about how there’s already a park along the Trinity River – and I walked over to Continental Bridge Park to grab some outfit shots as well.