Do normal people actually go around dressed like this in public? Or is this for pagents, or do only cosplayer types do it? Here’s a not very informative article about it:
Harajuku just… is. It’s a profoundly bizarre, often incredibly entertaining locale.
An exchange from a couple of years ago:
Friend: “Hey, check out this video! It’s a really bad transvestite lip-syncing to bad Japanese metal!”
OnK: “…I hate Harajuku.”
Friend: “How did you know it was in Harajuku?”
When I lived in Tokyo twenty years ago, you could stroll through Yoyogi Park on a Sunday afternoon and see every single subculture in the city on display. Bands would play, people would dress up in costumes to go see and be seen, strangers would actually talk to each other, etc. It was a lot of fun.
I doubt that these folks were dressing like this every day, of course; Sunday at Yoyogi was a weekly time to go a little crazy, break some social norms of anonymity and conformity.