At Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo back in March, there were precious few foreign faces on the ground and little attention from overseas media despite internationally acclaimed brands like Takahiro Miyashita’s The Soloist being back on the schedule. Likewise, Tokyo’s biggest seasonal celebration of youth fashion, Tokyo Girls Collection, is a resolutely domestic affair despite being broadcast on YouTube, and the brands involved being the ones currently picked over by tourists excited by the weak yen.
This all calls into question whether Japan’s air of aloof mystique — established by the likes of Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garcons in the 1980s, continuing through cult streetwear drops courtesy of Bape in the ’90s, and arguably peaking with rise of Harajuku as a brand in the 2000s — is still enough to convince foreign audiences to invest in Japanese fashion.
Today, it’s brands that reach out to their international customers that reap the rewards. This works at the lower end of the market for shops that can count on foot traffic, and this is where Japan excels. Case in point: The area immediately around Shibuya Station, which even after a dramatic redevelopment of the Miyashita Park area, is now going to see another major renewal — this time around the iconic Shibuya 109 store. The area was nominated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government this month as a Townscape Regeneration District, a scheme that aims to bring fashion into the urban space and preserve the area’s individuality.
This will no doubt play to inbound consumers, but after they get their quick Tokyo fashion fix, why would anyone delve deeper?
It doesn’t help that, despite fashion week officially being in March, there were still fall and winter shows from the same season going on as late as this month. In fact, one of Japan’s most promising talents, Daisuke Tanaka, chose to hold his eponymous brand’s show in Kyoto. Tanaka put together a fabulously decadent, celebrity-studded runway that the late Alexander McQueen would have approved of, but how many international buyers or journalists would have flown in just to see it?
Say what you will about Paris Fashion Week’s’ notoriously frosty welcome to newcomers, but at least it’s an event that respects the industry’s time. Once runway shows end, you can hop in a taxi to the showroom, often on the same day, to view collections and plan orders. Tokyo is stuck with showrooms that follow the week — counting on two weeks of a buyer’s time is asking too much, especially as Tokyo’s fashion week falls at the end of the fashion calendar with most of the top tier showcases having already come and gone.
This has made Tokyo a fashion city for the international consumer, not the industry. It’s not a problem in and of itself, but it’s a status quo that will increasingly leave some of the most talented designers landlocked to a mostly domestic clientele.
Designers like Mikio Sakabe — who should take credit for sketching the outline of the trends we now see representing Japanese fashion at the low and middle end of the market — remain markedly obscure, only attracting attention when they collaborate with more mainstream names. Fortunately for Sakabe, the designer’s latest joint venture with Pink House hits retail stores June 23. Sakabe’s designs, which overwhelm the wearer in an armor of monstrous frills and suffocating padding, offer a commentary on Japanese femininity that deserves an international stage it may never fully receive.
Likewise, Keisuke Kanda’s first interior design-meets-fashion collection, a concentrated array of wearable cushions and curtains, was shown recently at Beams Harajuku to little international attention, yet it immediately sold out (a limited number of items will be available online from June 17 to 28). On one hand, you could argue that this is a designer sufficiently popular to not need an international audience, but the loss is to Japanese fashion as a whole. Kanda is responsible for much of the hyper-kawaii fashion that is now the mainstream, but in his riffs on Japanese school uniforms and gym class gear, his Hinomaru-emblazoned designs, and his subversively phallic motifs, he offers an impressive exploration of national and sexual identity in a genre of fashion often dismissed as just “cute.”
For an example of how to handle things differently, look to Anrealage’s Kunihiko Morinaga, a contemporary and one-time collaborator of Kanda’s. If Kanda is super-domestic, Morinaga is a designer rarely out of the international spotlight, popping up on the catwalks of Paris and in international media. During the pandemic, he brought his collections into virtual metaverse settings, never missing an opportunity to put his work out there, and in doing so has become the face of Tokyo’s avant-garde.
But while excellent ambassadors like Morinaga exist, this phenomenon of insularity robs the world of the complete picture of Japanese fashion.
For more information, visit pinkhouse-webshop.jp/pinkhouse or keisukekanda.com.
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