All sounds vaguely familiar:

@ SSense.com; Text: Kanako Noda; Photography: Cailin Hill Araki

[....] Sotsu-ran is what happens when a deeply stigmatized rural subculture re-imagines the gaku-ran—the classic, square, all-black, five-button boys’ suit with a stand-up collar (tsume-eri). The gaku-ran is Japan’s historic middle school uniform, making sotsu-ran almost like a hallucinogenic homage—rebel fashion from the boondocks. Sotsu-ran is the unofficial graduation uniform of the Yankī, Japan’s original small-town trouble-makers. The Yankī underworld was born in tough, working class areas of Tokyo in the 1970s, but soon migrated to the countryside, where it experienced a boom in the 1980s. Today, it's obsolete in the mainstream, but pockets hang on in the rural backwaters.

In the West, there’d be nothing remarkable about a middle schooler trying to draw attention to himself through clothing. In conservative, bucolic Japan, the culture of conformism is pervasive—stifling, even. From the earliest age, kids face enormous pressure to look exactly like everyone else. Most spend their middle school years wearing Uniqlo or maybe MUJI, clothing that is carefully calibrated to avoid differentiating them from one another. By that standard, Shinnosuke’s a deviant—his bright red sotsu-ran is a middle finger flipped directly at the commodified minimalist aesthetics of the mainstream [....]