High Fashion — Pawel Jaszczuk's Tokyo Salaryman Photobook
High Fashion by Pawel Jaszczuk is a Tokyo salaryman photobook documenting exhausted businessmen photographed asleep on sidewalks, staircases, and benches across the city between 2008 and 2010. Riding through Tokyo in the early hours, Jaszczuk captured men in suits whose collapsed postures inadvertently echoed the composed staging of fashion editorials — a deadpan visual tension that gives the series its title.
The work originates from Salaryman, a self-published zine from 2009, issued in an edition of 150. This third edition, produced in a large-format magazine-style photobook by Zen Foto Gallery, marks the series' most complete presentation to date. The shift from zine to photobook extends the visual logic without dissolving it — the format itself reads as commentary.
The photographs hold a persistent ambiguity. Corporate dress codes, maintained with apparent care, meet total physical surrender. The humor is structural rather than cheap: the suits remain intact while the men do not. Across 86 photographs, the cumulative effect is less satire than document — a record of overwork culture in urban Japan rendered with a flat, almost clinical eye.
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About Pawel Jaszczuk
Pawel Jaszczuk (b. 1978, Warsaw, Poland) is a photographer known for his documentation of urban life, nightlife, and subcultures in Japan. He studied graphic design in Australia and spent over a decade living and working in Tokyo. His projects — among them Salaryman, High Fashion, and Kinky City — combine direct observation with a sustained interest in social contradiction and visual absurdity.
His work has been exhibited internationally and published by Zen Foto Gallery, Morel Books, and others. Also available: ¥€$U$ (JESUS). See all titles in the Pawel Jaszczuk collection.
