Like gazing at the clouds, or staring at the inkblots of a Rorschach test, the beauty in Ryunosuke Okazaki’s work is that it can appear as almost anything. Is that a butterfly? A kabuki mask? The face of a frog? Nothing is planned or intended; everything is open to interpretation. “There’s a strange feeling that … Read more
Of all the main characters in the Comme des Garçons clan, Tao Kurihara is the name we hear the least. Her label, Tao, shuttered in 2011—she stopped showing in Paris, and instead was set to work on the Comme des Garçons Tricot line. Then, in 2021, with nothing more than a whisper, Tricot was rebranded … Read more
It’s been a year since we last saw Pillings at Tokyo Fashion Week. This afternoon, in a show that ran two days after the official Tokyo fall 2024 schedule ended, we gathered in the wooden lecture hall of the Jiyu Gakuen Girls’ School to see what designer Ryota Murakami has been working on. We started … Read more
Like many designers in Tokyo this season, Hyke’s Hideaki Yoshihara and Yukiko Ode spoke about looking to their past for the Fall collection. The brand, which the couple launched in 2013, has been crafting technical wear into cool-looking casual staples long before it became the trendy thing to do, and has built a loyal fanbase … Read more
Keisuke Yoshida held his fall show on the campus grounds of Rikkyo University, a private Christian institution where the designer went to school as a child. For 16 bittersweet years Yoshida, now 33, shuffled around this place, and tonight the memories of that forlorn little boy came back to haunt it once more. The runway … Read more
Takahiro Miyashita’s fall collection was what the designer called “a cacophony of eternal pieces,” made up of a selection of reimagined items taken from the designer’s own wardrobe. How intimate! And how very Miyashita. He called it Days of our Youth, a look back on his favorite eras—punk, as usual, shone through—and it served as … Read more
Viviano Sue’s fall collection was a personal reckoning for the designer, and the diasporic identity he’s spent his adult life grappling with. With a childhood fractured between the US, China, and Japan, Sue spoke of how he’d never felt like he belonged anywhere, and had struggled to find his community. Fast forward to now, and … Read more
Like great jazz musicians that know how to improvise on a score, Yu Kobayashi and Yuji Abe of Irenisa have a formidable knowledge of clothes making which helps them riff on the classics and create menswear that expertly toes the line between disciplined and playful. During a walkthrough of their fall collection at their showroom … Read more
Sunday night was something of a homecoming for Masu’s Shinpei Goto. Officially opening Tokyo Fashion Week with a screening of a film of his Paris debut at the men’s shows in January, the designer gathered Tokyo’s fashion industry and his growing community of followers—called Masu Boys—to celebrate. (The fact that Masu’s fans have their own … Read more
The idea of freedom had been playing on Sayori Tanaka’s mind this season. “There are many people around the world whose freedom is being restricted in various ways, and I feel resentful and angry about that, so the collection expressed this,” the designer explained following her fall show, which was held in the vast hall … Read more
