Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo officially ran from March 14 to 19, but with spinoff events such as Shibuya Fashion Week continuing right through the end of March, the once-contained spectacle is rapidly threatening to graduate to a fashion month.
Many of these related events are more closely associated with art than fashion. Shibuya NFT Art Junction highlights digital artwork, while the rather literally named FASHIONART blurs the line between its titular genres.
Despite this, these events are the main draws for members of the general public. This has always been an issue with including those from outside the industry in fashion weeks, as the actual clothes on the runway are for later in the year. The general public, however, is fixated on shopping for next season at the latest.
Savvy designers such as Mikio Sakabe are getting good at appealing to everyone. He chose fashion week to announce a collaboration with art collective Kaikai Kiki member Aya Takano, whose last full collection with Issey Miyake in 2004 is the stuff of legends. This time around, Sakabe presented the collection to the industry also allowed for preorders from the general public as well.
This kind of approach is nothing new, but doing it well is another matter entirely. Getting people to order in March something they won’t receive until September works for luxury watches and bags where waiting lists are the norm, but for trend-focused fashion you really need to catch people while they are excited for next season — like at fashion week.
The majority of runway collections and installations are all on Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo’s official YouTube channel, and, if you are hyped for the Sakabe-Takano collaboration, you have until April 24 on the official homepage.
Meta fashion
Also held during March was the inaugural Metaverse Fashion Week, a worldwide gathering of digital fashion. Kunihiko Morinaga’s Anrealage was the only Japanese designer who participated — something in keeping with Morinaga’s reputation as someone never far away from the latest technical frontiers. Held on the virtual platform Decentraland, this fashion week consisted of runways using digital assets and virtual presentations of collections.
Anrealage was, as ever, a great representative for Japanese fashion on the global stage, but one couldn’t help but be struck by how Western the graphics and character models were for the surrounding digital space. There was something slightly off about seeing a style frequently paired with anime flung out of context into a world modeled out of Decentraland’s neon-drenched assets and with trends that haven’t been worn unironically for decades.
There was also MetaTokyo held on the same Decentraland platform for Japanese creatives. Featuring the twins AMIAYA, who hold significant influencer capital online, and produced with the help of Asobi System, this was a clearer proof of concept for what a Tokyo-centric virtual fashion week might look like.
Still, to put it bluntly the graphics presented don’t compare entirely favorably with the kind of games that people are playing on their smartphones or the kind of virtual avatars popular on livestreaming platforms. This is a not insignificant teething problem in the image-based fashion industry. Vapid and superficial it might be, but no amount of NFT functionality can compensate for virtual fashion that doesn’t actually look good.
The issue here is that good character models take talent and time to create, and even selling an NFT for ¥10,000 (a very low amount in this world) would not begin to cover the cost of getting a designer to work on a project. Even though the prices for NFT fashion are frequently mocked as exorbitant, the reality is that a unique digital asset that actually looks good is going to cost a significant amount.
Of course, it would be wise not to be so dismissive of emerging technology. One of the reasons that people are somewhat cynical about NFTs and the Metaverse as a whole is the issue of cost. The volatility of digital currencies as well as the simple cost of entry — high-quality VR headsets still run in the hundreds of dollars — lock people out. Until that changes, more people will talk about these worlds from the outside than actually participating in them. What’s more, very few screenshots and videos of these virtual events seem to make it out to the wider world, leaving the interested unable to get a solid idea of what they are missing out on. The curious have no choice but to blindly jump on in.
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