If the weather gods were on Shinya Kozuka’s side at his last show in the summer, tonight it seemed they were demanding payback. On possibly the most miserable rainy evening of the year so far, the designer held his fall show in the (drained, but still very wet) outdoor pool of the Tokyo Prince Hotel. … Read more
The mask is slowly slipping. Khoki—the anonymous collective of designers who have for the past couple of seasons been lighting up Tokyo with their idiosyncratic, happy-go-lucky approach to menswear—is slowly being pulled out of their self-made obscurity by the far-reaching arm of the fashion machine. The rules of the 2024 LVMH Prize dictated that semifinalist … Read more
You can usually tell a lot about a man by the clothes he wears, but not if Koki Enomoto has anything to do with it. The Attachment designer makes it his business to remove any predictable or cliché details from his menswear and attempts to render something harder to define. Clean tailoring; sharp lines; total … Read more
There has been much talk in fashion recently about designers doing away with lofty abstract concepts and putting more focus directly on the clothes, but Stein’s Kiichiro Asakawa is the real deal. Ask the self-taught designer a hackneyed question about his inspiration, and he’ll hit back with a near-mathematical description of how each individual garment … Read more
Wa, a catchall term for a traditional (and sometimes intangible) sense of ‘Japaneseness’, is something Rainmaker’s Kohichi Watanabe knowingly channels into his clothes. The 44-year-old designer did that and more this season, riffing on what he called the “common consciousness” of Eastern and Western art in the 1920s: Art Deco in American and Europe, and … Read more
