About

Rolled up Shirts with Black Bikinis (Japanese: たくし上げ黒ビキニ; Takushiage Kuro Bikini) refer to a popular motif for moe illustrations where girls are rolling up their shirts and showing black bikinis. Throughout its trend on Twitter and Pixiv in February 2015, this sexy pose established its concept as a moe situation in the Japanese otaku culture.

Origin

According to the Pixiv Encyclopedia^[1] and Nico Nico Pedia,^[2] the trigger of this illustration meme was a series of fanart for the Japanese online card game series Kantai Collection (KanColle); which were posted on Twitter by Japanese illustrator Ichijirushi (いちじるし)^[3] in the beginning of February 2015. His first work of the KanColle fleet girl Hamakaze^[4] rolling up her shirt and showing black bikini was uploaded on the 2nd day of that month.^[5] Then, another tweet summarizing several fleet girl works in in the following week had earned over 3,000 retweets and 10,000 favorites within the first 3 days (shown below). From the very beginning, the term "Rolled up Shirts with Black Bikinis" was used by the author to express the outfit.^[6]

たくし上げ黒ビキニシリーズの数が揃ってきたのでまとめました。気になった方は描いていただけると僕が喜びます。 pic.twitter.com/87sZXvuqfj

— いちぢるし (@one_emblem) February 8, 2015

Translation:

Here are my recent works for Rolled up Shirts with Black Bikini series. It will make me happy if you like these and draw your own ones.

Naturally, rolling up clothes wasn't a new idea. There already existed countless photos of female models or cosplayers rolling up their skirts/shirts by hands or a mouth, and showing swimsuits, underwear or naked bodies. Particularly amongst otaku artists, this has been a cliche motif for hentai illustrations since before, which is evidenced by over thousands of illustrations tagged under "Roll up" (たくし上げ) in online illustrators communities.^[7][8] Nevertheless, this series of his works was the milestone in the subculture because his catchy naming and convincing illustrations of girls with large breasts succeeded to show its allure enough to establish the motif as one of the moe concepts.

Spread

Within that month, the term became to a hashtag on the social network,^[9] and over 300 illustrations of "Rolled up Shirts with Black Bikinis" had been uploaded to Twitter, Pixiv^[10] and Nico Nico Seiga^[11] by many amateur illustrators. Because these follow up works were largely associated with the KanColle fandom due to its origin, the illustration fad was quickly covered by many KanColle-affiliated matome blogs and a Togetter article^[12] as well as featured by Pixiv's art news section, Pixiv Spotlight, in English.^[13]

Meanwhile, the illustration trend actually ended after a short period because of the advent of new moe fetish item, the Front Zipper Swimsuit, in the following month. But regardless of that, its concept is widely shared amongst otakus by the term coined by the originator.

Various Examples

Search Interest

[Not Available]

External References

Editor’s Note: Registration is needed to browse the original videos/illustrations listed in this section.