Rakuten Tokyo Fashion Week drew to a close late on Saturday night with the debut show from Tamme. Designer Tatsuya Tamada, who previously worked as a pattern cutter for Sacai, showed a strong collection of military-inspired tailoring to much applause.
The Tamme show ended a long week on a high note. There were 37 designers on the schedule, with 32 physical shows held across six days (plus a video presentation by the up-and-coming Stein on the preceding Sunday night. Stein recapped their first runway, which was held at Paris Men’s Fashion Week in January).
The overall mood among attendees is that the event is ticking along well despite a few logistical hurdles, with a marked increase in international buyers and runway highlights that continue to show the week’s promise as a platform for exciting and unique talent.
Here’s an in-depth rundown of the week.
A disrupted, diluted schedule
The shift back a week in the international fashion week calendar caused problems for Japan Fashion Week Organization (JFWO), which was forced to hold the Autumn/Winter season later than usual. This meant its usual main venue, the Hikarie building in Shibuya, was unavailable, forcing the JFWO to seek out new venues in Spiral Market and Toda Hall, on opposite sides of the city. “Because Paris finished so late this time, we didn’t have a choice. Timing is a hard issue for us, but we are planning to return to the Hikarie in September,” said Kaoru Imajo, director of JFWO.
Tokyo Fashion Week’s timing is a sticking point for both press and buyers. “From a business perspective, Tokyo Fashion Week is often out of sync with the buying schedule,” said Issei Koyama, director of Amanojak, a Tokyo-based select shop that stocks a wide range of international and domestic brands. Because of the late schedule, it’s not unusual for brands to hold buying appointments even months or weeks before they show on the runway, which also isn’t ideal. “I prefer to see the collections after the show because then you can feel the enthusiasm of what they put on the runway,” said Koyama. “The earlier they show, the better.”
Others broke from the schedule completely. Many of Tokyo’s strongest menswear labels, such as Khoki, Shinya Kozuka and Meanswhile held their shows off-schedule in mid-February in order to better fit the buying schedule, robbing the main schedule of some pulling power. “The absence of some of those stronger brands makes the week feel thin and long, which makes it hard for our team to cover,” said Reona Kondo, fashion features editor at Vogue Japan. “If there were better-known brands crammed into one day, more people would come.”
However, the Tokyo Fashion Award helped slightly flesh the schedule out. A reliable platform for the city’s best-emerging designers, the annual award provides eight brands with a sum of 1 million yen (approx £5,180) towards an Autumn/Winter show, plus use of the main venue, and facilitates a showroom in Paris for two seasons. This year’s recipients included Tamme, Satoru Sasaki (who has experience as a design intern at Phoebe Philo’s Celine), Riv Nobuhiko, led by a duo of CSM graduates, and Hatra, a futuristically minded brand by Keisuke Nagami who uses AI to create his unusual prints. “I thought what he did was very interesting,” said Kondo, who was wearing one of the designer’s space-age silver puffer jackets.
Making it worth the journey
The lack of attendance from international guests has been one of Tokyo Fashion Week’s biggest issues since its inception. JFWO made a concerted effort to change that this season, introducing a support programme to facilitate visits for a handful of international press and buyers — with the stipulation that journalists produce at least three articles and that buyers make appointments with at least five brands during their visit, in exchange for a contribution to their expenses.
Buyers invited on the programme this season included Manuel Marelli from Macondo in Verona, Italy and Andreas Murkudis, who runs his eponymous boutique in Berlin, Germany. Murkudis stocks over 30 Japanese brands and has been visiting Tokyo to buy them for over a decade, but this was the buyer’s first time at Tokyo Fashion Week. “I think Tokyo is the most inspiring city at the moment,” he said. He buys the high majority of the Japanese brands he stocks from Paris showrooms, but not all of them make the journey. Buyers who want something special will have to make the journey to Tokyo.
Hyke, the popular outdoorsy womenswear brand, held its first runway show in five years this season. It attracted 521 guests to the Ariake Arena in Tokyo Bay, making it the biggest show of the season. Hyke does not hold showrooms abroad; for designers Hideaki Yoshihara and Yukiko Ode, the bi-annual trip to Paris is not currently worth it. “Of course, we would like more international business, but if we have to move up a whole month to show in Paris, it’s a hardship for ourselves and our staff,” said Yoshihara.
Kyle Smith, fashion editor for the US National Football Association (NFA), also attended. This season he brought a few players with him to see the shows, among them Quentin Lake of the Los Angeles Rams. Speaking after the sportswear-heavy Basicks, which held its show in a rugby stadium, Smith said Tokyo Fashion Week made for a refreshing break from the other fashion cities. “I like that it’s about the fashion. I feel like a lot of other fashion weeks have just become a circus of who has the most followers,” he said.
An international effort
JFWO’s international effort stretched beyond the buyers. While Tokyo’s schedule has been entirely populated with Asian talent for the past few years, this time, Paul Smith was invited as a guest designer by Rakuten’s By R initiative. Japanese actors Lily Franky, Kyoko Hasegawa and Tsubasa Honda sat front row.
“I adore Japan and so to be invited to the fashion week here is an absolute honour. It’s a lovely way to show the international collection here to my domestic customers and fans,” Sir Paul Smith, who had flown in the morning before the show, told Vogue Business.
The British label, which operates in 60 countries around the world and does 40 per cent of its business in Japan, sees Rakuten (which has a market cap of $13 billion) as a worthy partner and seeks to leverage its considerable e-commerce reach. For Rakuten’s part, the clout Paul Smith brings to the fashion week schedule is good for its profile. “Collaborating with world-class brands like Paul Smith through Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo and the by R project is key to boosting the Tokyo fashion scene’s presence internationally,” said Ryo Matsumura, Rakuten Group’s head of fashion.
Burnishing trust with buyers through quality
With the weak yen making international brands prohibitively expensive, Japanese brands can catch the eye of domestic buyers with competitive pricing and superior quality that is often made in Japan. “The strongest point for us is that we can produce,” said Hirofumi Kurino, co-founder and creative advisor of United Arrows. “From fabric to sewing to knitting to finishing, we make everything we can here. Only in Italy and Japan can we do this.” He highlighted womenswear brands Hyke, Fetico and Telma (whose designer Terumasa Nakajima worked at Dries van Noten) among the shows that exhibited particularly notable quality this season.
It follows that buyers, both local and visiting, place natural trust in Japanese brands. “When I want to buy a young European brand, I can’t help but feel that Japanese brands are of a higher level of craftsmanship, so it’s easier for me to buy Japanese brands,” said Koyama. Before the pandemic, Amanojak’s buy was split 50/50 between international and domestic designers; in recent years, the Japanese share at the store has risen to 70 per cent. “The quality-first approach is natural in Japan, and there’s creativity built on top of that, so we can buy with confidence,” he said.
Murkudis also says that Japanese brands are generally a safe business bet among his customers, who appreciate quality. “With a lot of our Japanese brands, we sell almost 80-90 per cent before the sales,” he said. Kurino has seen a similar trend: “The Japanese brands sell very, very well,” he agreed. Even compared to Western luxury brands? “Right now, yes. If we compare the delivery timing too, the Japanese brands always arrive on time, earlier than the European brands.”
The IYKYK fashion capital
Despite the rocky issues with the schedule and some grumbles about the locations, the week was dotted with plenty of strong points. Pillings, a knitwear brand by Ryota Murakami, was one of the stars of the week. A semi-finalist for this year’s LVMH Prize, he showed a selection of arrestingly strange sweaters and dresses, hand-knitted with folds and wrinkles that rippled across the body.
The womenswear brand has doubled its stockists in the past season and is now looking to push abroad. “We were able to get some great offers thanks to the LVMH Prize, so we are in the process of urgently creating a system that will allow us to export overseas as a company. We are already receiving orders from a lot of stores in Asia and are not sure if we can keep up, but we are going to try our best,” said Murakami.
Pillings was one of the brands Murkudis picked up this season. “I was impressed that they work only on knitwear, and their quality was like knitwear couture,” he said. Chika Kisada, who showed a punkish ballet-inspired collection that included a Barbie collaboration, and Harunobu Murata, a Jil Sander alum who develops original fabrics, also left a good impression. “The Japanese brands don’t compromise, they are really strict with the products they make and the quality. It’s a clear vision,” added Murkudis.
Nick Wooster, the fashion consultant who is on the Tokyo Fashion Award jury and visits every season, was similarly effusive. “I feel like Japanese brands are an ‘if you know, you know’ sort of thing. Probably more than any other place in the world, that’s the badge they carry, which is in diametric opposition to [the mass approach of] LVMH and Kering,” he said. Amid the luxury slowdown, Japanese brands (and, by extension, Tokyo Fashion Week) can seize the opportunity to appeal to fashion fans who want something different.
Murkudis is leading the charge. Some of the Pillings sweaters he bought this season were around €800 wholesale price — on the more expensive side of a Tokyo brand — but the buyer is not concerned. “When our customers like it, they buy it. The price is not a problem,” he said.
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