From start to finish, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tokyo's 2013 spring/summer collections hit new heights, literally, as the catwalk parades were staged way up in the event's new home at the Hikarie shopping tower in city center Shibuya.
It's now seven years since the inaugural weeklong string of shows began in Tokyo, aiming for the same success as the biannual fashion weeks in New York, Milan and Paris. But here, the twice-yearly fests have failed to seep into the local, let alone the national, consciousness.
Making things worse is the unfortunate, undeserved bad rep the event suffers due to some people wrongly associating it in some way with the chaotic season-long string of random shows called the Tokyo Collections that started in 1985.