Japanese fashion brand sells T-shirts with Scottish towns and council areas design prints featuring North Lanarkshire, Falkirk and West Lothian

Scottish Twitter (or X) is having a field day as one user discovered a Japanese store selling T-shirts branded with designs labelled with towns and council areas around Scotland.

Featuring North Lanarkshire, Falkirk, West Lothian, and more - the tops are sold for around 1,489 Yen, which is around £7.20.

The tops are sold by Japanese fashion brand ‘Shoo-La-Rue’ under their ‘Cutie Blonde’ collection. It’s appealing to a long-standing fashion trend in Japan called ‘gyaru’ - a Japanese transliteration of the English word ‘gal’. Beginning in the 1970s, the fashion subculture was meant to be nonconformist and eschew traditional social and aesthetic standards expected of women in Japan of the era.

It peaked in the 90s and 2000s, and in the modern day it’s very different to the traditional gyaru movement - while back in the Y2K era it was mostly lots of fake tan and blonde hair dye, nowadays it’s more-so random English words that look pretty printed on different shirts. Far from its nonconformist roots, more-so seeming like a sort of mimicry of Western fashion trends.

It’s unclear to us if it’s meant to be ironic, though probably not, how often do you walk through Primark and see places like Bali or Tokyo or New York printed on a T-shirt or sweatshirt? This is pretty much the same thing.

That all being said, maybe the people of Japan really do find the lands of Falkirk and North Lanarkshire a beautiful and exotic place, and who could blame them? Who is to say there aren’t dozens of Japanese people walking through the streets of Shibuya, Tokyo right now - proud to be representing the likes of Cumbernauld and Motherwell? Good on them I say.

You can find the original tweet and the discourse around it by clicking here.

If you’re interested in more links between Scotland and Japan - check out this article we wrote on the origins of Japanese Whisky started by a woman from Kirkintilloch.

If you take a look below you can see the very best designs we could find on the website - and if you want to have a look for yourself, click here.