Tokyo's fashion fans spent six days in the middle of this month looking at the city from the lofty viewpoint afforded by Shibuya's Hikarie building, and yet for all the excitement that was generated over the coming fall/winter collections, the rest of the city still showed general ambivalence toward Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tokyo. It's a situation that is frequently lamented by the industry, costing the event both publicity and international luster. It's also a situation that is difficult to account for in a city so patently in love with fashion.

With this as our backdrop, we look to Christian Dada designer Masanori Morikawa, one of the few to transcend Tokyo fashion week on his path to Paris but for whom the event still has a place for his output. The 31-year-old designer has enjoyed a rapid rise to the top of the Japanese fashion landscape, as well as much-envied inroads in Paris — all in a mere five years. Now the brand is back on the Tokyo schedule with its first ever full women's collection, marking this designer as an experienced navigator of the fashion system on a global scale and, most importantly, putting Tokyo fashion week back on his agenda.

"I put most of my success down to good timing," Morikawa says. "In the first year after founding my brand in 2010, but I was basically a remake brand. My first and second season, from 2010 through 2011, were entirely repurposed vintage clothing collections, chain mail T-shirts and studded shoes. To go from that to showing at Paris ... well, there's no other way to describe it: It has been pretty fast."