It seems the word "Harajuku" burst into America's pop culture scene almost overnight. From the Tokyo street fashion-inspired challenges on the reality show America's Next Top Model to the anthem "Harajuku Girls" on Gwen Stefani's solo project, Love. Angel. Music. Baby., it's evident the best time for a cultural invasion of the Japanese persuasion is now. In the song "Harajuku Girls," Stefani praises Harajuku's "wicked style"and credits Harajuku girls with "bringing color and style all around the world." While the singer was busy introducing the four trendy young Japanese women she keeps in tow and explaining how their street-savvy style has influenced her music and L.A.M.B. fashion line, she was inadvertently giving America a taste of Eastern pop culture.

Long before Stefani transported her Harajuku girls into America's limelight, fiercely dressed Japanese teenagers on the other side of the globe were bringing fashion to life on their own turf. Emerging in Tokyo in the early '90s, hipsters in the Harajuku fashion district blew away designers with their untouchable sense of style. Defying all the rules of fashion, trendy teens decked themselves out with a look reminiscent of Japanese anima. Larger-than-life hair and astonishingly colorful makeup stood atop deconstructed kimonos, stripped knee socks and Chuck Taylor high tops. The defining factor of Harajuku style is its extreme mixtures of different cultures meshed with traditional Japanese dress. Harajuku style embraces handmade clothing concocted from second-hand items and mixed and matched with designer duds. It's not unusual to find a Comme des Garçons dress over a pair of tattered thrift store jeans with a Louis Vuitton bag and designer shoes whose backs are intentionally crushed down to create a mule.

While the clothes are fantastically over the top, the explosive power of the Harajuku movement is not what is being worn but who is calling the shots. Fashion magazines and designers like Stefani stand back and take notes while young people on the street set the standards. One trendsetter, Nigo, unexpectedly became one of Japan's most sought-after designers when he began making T-shirts in lieu of the cool ones he couldn't find to please his own taste. Today his label, A Bathing Ape, is so coveted in Tokyo that when a shirt is finally acquired it instantly gives street credit to hipsters in the fashion-obsessed world of Harajuku. And much like Stefani's Harajuku girls, Nigo will also be hitting North American soil when he opens A Bathing Ape store in New York's SoHo district this spring.

As Japanese photographer Shoichi Aoki explains, "Here fashion is more about the art of putting things on than about the art of making clothes." Mixing designers like Yohji Yamamoto with micro-mini plaid skirts, ruffled socks, platform Mary Jane shoes and Hello Kitty hair accessories is all in a day's work for the girls of Harajuku. In fact, the variations in Tokyo's street style are endless. It's a world that gives freedom from typical fashion and yet at the same time creates trends. As Stefani recently told MTV, "These kids have self-expression through fashion." And that expression is about making your wildest fashion fantasies come true and alive on the streets of Harajuku.