The push for owning “brand”/ haul culture

Edit: just a huge mwah to everyone sharing their thoughts! I love to hear everyone's opinions, i love having discussions with gals!!!

I wanted to make this as a discussion to hear out from other gyaru/gyaruo on the subreddit about “brand” pieces/closet collections. I put “brand” in quotes as some popular brands amongst gals aren’t like branded for gals.

I’ve been looking into my own consumption patterns at the end of 2024, saw the same question about what brands to buy in this reddit 200x, and talked with some mutuals via Instagram about how there is sometimes this underlying push to buy “branded items”/growing your closet at an unprecedented speed. A lot of folks new to gal these past few years seem to be rushing to buy pieces, and I myself made that push for getting ma*rs pieces starting out since 2021/2022 (and def went a bit too crazy last year). I also feel like some people see gyaru who have a lot of brand more “valid” when it really takes styling those items to look good.

There’s also haul culture, which I have contributed to! This is not just a gyaru thing ofc, but there’s folks out there who are fortunate enough to have disposable income to buy lots of things at one time and spend lots of over scalped pieces, and I can see in comments of posts being encouraging it. But then do we have so many clothes and accessories it feels like we can’t even wear them all? I could keep going into fast trend cycles and how we all want instant results, but I will save my blab but just note I think these are also contributing to people buying LOADS of brand or SHEIN when starting out.

With the scalped prices of the extreme popular brands, and for US gals, a potential huge shift to the economy, is there any way as a community to push for folks new to the subculture as well as folks who have been here for awhile to work on pushing for a less… consumerism part of gyaru? Of course this sounds hypocritical as gyaru has always been about trends, but I think these past few years we’ve seen a lot of people join and buy a lot and then leave in less than a year.