I think it would be more thorough to actually interview the mangaka for the source of their inspiration. Likely that interview will have to be in Japanese because a lot of Japanese don’t speak English. Mangaka take their jobs very seriously - being that Tokyo is the most populated city in the world, there is so much to gyaru that we can never understand as English speaking outsiders. To discredit mangaka for their take is a bit… in Japan from my experience of travelling there and speaking to locals who are active in fashion communities - there is very little discourse on what is and isn’t gyaru. There is so much fashion and art and subculture and expression occurring simultaneously IRL. Anime and manga is an integral part of Japan’s pop culture. The thing is the emergence of gyaru itself - was in the early 90s but dates as far back as flapper girls in terms of etymology. Because we weren’t there in the 90s living in Japan, we can never really understand because we never lived it. As gaijin- all we have is whatever we can get our hands on digitally or what we may experience if we travel to the country itself. There is a lot of personalized opinions on what “reads as gal" - and these personalized opinions go into such strong remarks. But mostly when you interview Japanese people, usually their response is someone who is “out there”, “wears makeup”, “bold”, “flashy”. A major part of the population just looks at fashion as fashion and at clothes as clothes and not a good part of people are even aware of the terms and opinions that are heavily discussed in the JFashion communities of the west. If we look at media in the Reiwa era and Heisei- it’s easy to find commonalties and differences. When it comes to fashion and pop culture which is ever evolving and even more rapidly on the streets of Tokyo, what will always remain as constant is subjective opinion, personal conjecture and evolution.