Abstract

This article examines how Japanese schoolgirl-uniform fashion, commonly termed JK dress, moves from digital visual symbolism into embodied practice in Chinese vaporwave party culture. Drawing on an exploratory qualitative reading of online visual materials and publicity from related music parties, it investigates the relationship between vaporwave’s audiovisual aesthetics and their embodiment through clothing. The analysis suggests that vaporwave constructs nostalgic simulacra by decontextualizing and recombining fragments of late twentieth-century sound and imagery. In the examples discussed, Japanese anime girls function as visual anchors by combining historical recognizability with opportunities for emotional projection. JK dress then translates these two-dimensional signs into bodily experience, producing a recursive sequence of cultural simulacra, visual signs, and embodied practices. In offline parties, this process gives rise to “delayed youth”: a temporarily inhabitable, imagined youthfulness mediated by music, dress, and collective movement. Read through heterotopia and Bakhtinian carnival, these practices suggest how media nostalgia can become a shared means of emotional adjustment. The article extends the analysis of vaporwave nostalgia from sound and images to clothing and bodies, while recognizing the limited scope of its visual materials and the absence of systematic participant interviews.

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