This season’s Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo unfolded during Japan’s hottest summer on record. With temperatures consistently in the mid-30 degrees and unrelentingly high humidity, the streets were filled with umbrellas as people shielded themselves from the sunlight. But the heat didn’t deter the fashion week show-goers and street style set from donning the bold looks Tokyo is known for.
With just 25 brands showing across six days (and plenty of air-conditioned venues to escape into), the schedule was mercifully manageable. The Japan Fashion Week Organisation (JFWO) celebrated 20 years with a party on the Friday before the official week began, bringing together multiple generations of designers and industry figures, including 88-year-old Hiroko Koshino who has been designing since the 1960s.
JFWO put more emphasis on physical shows this season — removing digital presentations from the schedule entirely — with the idea to push quality over quantity in a continued effort to elevate the standing of the event. “We could have had more designers [on the schedule], but we wanted to make the barrier to entry higher,” says JFWO director Kaoru Imajo. “We don’t just see their creations, we also look at their Instagram and their sales; we want to make sure there is a high standard.”
Tokyo’s fashion scene is entering a stage of maturation, with a new generation of designers breaking through as well as some familiar and fresh challenges to reckon with. Here are the key takeaways from the week.
A menswear dilemma
One reason for the lighter schedule was that many of Tokyo’s emerging menswear brands, including Kamiya, Attachment and Shinyakozuka, chose to show off-schedule in July and August.
Yuu Tsuruta, who does the PR for Kamiya, which showed in Tokyo Bay in August, explains the predicament, saying that international buyers’ budgets are mostly spent by the end of the Paris Men’s shows. Showing closer to Paris also means that menswear brands are better prepared in the event that they want to make the jump to show in Europe. “We’re not necessarily interested in holding a show in Paris, but business-wise it makes sense for us to do our showroom there,” he says.
The lack of strong menswear talent on the schedule is a sticking point. “Tokyo’s designer fashion scene has traditionally been very strong in menswear, yet unlike other global cities, Tokyo does not have a dedicated men’s fashion week aligned with the international menswear calendar,” says Mami Osugi, a Tokyo-based editor who serves on the jury of the Tokyo Fashion Award. “As a result, Tokyo’s talented menswear designers often miss out on the global attention they deserve.”
JFWO is currently working on solutions, says Imajo. “One thing we may do in February is try and get the [off-schedule] brands to show closer to each other, but stretching everything out is easier for the designers because they are able to get the models and the venues [they want],” he says. Staying in closer contact with visiting buyers and inviting them to off-schedule shows is also an option JFWO are considering, Imajo adds.
A growing front row
Another of Tokyo Fashion Week’s main challenges has been its lack of international buyers and press. JFWO is gradually addressing this, and this season, invited more influential figures from Asia and beyond. Returning attendees this time included Andreas Murkudis of the eponymous store in Berlin, and journalist Eugene Rabkin of Style Zeitgeist; new invitees included menswear and womenswear buyers from 10 Corso Como in Seoul and IT in Hong Kong.
Rabkin intends to continue attending Tokyo Fashion Week whenever possible, finding it more interesting than Europe. “There are a lot of designers that you can only see here in Tokyo,” he says. “There is more of a connection between the brands, the fashion shows, the shops and the people in the street. In Paris, I always feel like I’m in a circus, and I don’t get that feeling in Tokyo, because you actually see interesting kids in the street. There’s more congruence.” Kohei Hashimoto, a womenswear buyer at Isetan, echoes the sentiment. “Tokyo stands out for the depth of consumer understanding of clothing and the closeness of fashion to everyday life. I believe it surpasses any other city in this respect,” he says.
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June Moon, chief womenswear buyer for 10 Corso Como Seoul, served on the jury of the Tokyo Fashion Award and was invited to attend Tokyo Fashion Week for the first time. “Compared to Seoul, which is very trendy and changes very fast, Japan is more consistent,” she says. “Japanese designers have their core philosophy and build the brand around this story.”
Even with its smaller size, the week offered a blend of newcomer debuts alongside the return of legacy designers. Tsumori Chisato, known for her pastel kawaii prints and bold silhouettes, joined the schedule for a show celebrating her brand’s 35th anniversary. “It was my first time showing in seven and a half years,” she told press after the show. “I put all the rainbows and colours in my clothes to show my appreciation for everyone, for supporting me for all these years.”
Haute Mode Hirata, whose late founder Akio Hirata would have turned 100 this year, also held a special show. Showing a selection of couture-worthy hats, the models wore clothing by three of the city’s emerging labels: Tamme, Mister It and Ryunosuke Okazaki. “It really felt like a mixture of tradition and newness, and showed the breadth of Japanese fashion,” says Tamme’s Tatsuya Tamada, who formerly worked as a pattern cutter at Sacai.
Mukcyen, founded in 2023 by Yuka Kimura, a 27-year-old former Yohji Yamamoto staffer, opened the week with its debut runway show, featuring dystopian dresses that mimicked a second skin. Orimi, a menswear brand by Kenta Orimi, also joined the schedule for the first time, closing the week on Saturday night with a show of neo-gothic tailoring inspired by his youth spent in Harajuku. “With my brand, I want to take the essence [of Harajuku] and elevate it to an international level, sharing the things I feel and experience, not just within Japan, but with the world,” says Orimi.
The womenswear names to watch
The strongest shows came from brands that weren’t the newest or the oldest, but have instead been around for five to 10 years and are beginning to blossom. Hashimoto’s highlight this season was Pillings, a knitwear-focused brand by Ryota Murakami that was shortlisted for this year’s LVMH Prize.
“With the current momentum of quiet luxury, menswear brands specialising in real clothes and streetwear are thriving on a global scale, but I sense some stagnation among more conceptual womenswear designers,” Hashimoto says. Conversely, simple womenswear can struggle to stand apart, he adds, making it difficult to generate a major shift in the market. “Rather than leaning too heavily on the notion of ‘real clothes’, Pillings framed the everyday within a designer context. This felt like it could be a significant breakthrough for womenswear designers.”
10 Corso Como’s Moon was impressed by Fetico’s Emi Funayama, known for her lingerie-inspired womenswear that challenges conservative tropes of female dress in Japan, as an example of a designer that stays true to her core aesthetic while still managing to evolve. This season, the brand held its biggest show yet with the support of Rakuten’s By R initiative, which each season provides funding for a prominent designer to show. “It was great. She’s definitely one I’m keeping an eye on,” says Moon.
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How can other Japanese womenswear brands follow Pillings and Fetico’s lead? While Japanese brands are world class in craftsmanship and product quality, they also need a clear-cut identity to compete on the global stage, says Isetan’s Hashimoto. “Customers evaluate a piece from a Japanese independent label in the same way they evaluate a garment from a global luxury maison,” he explains. “For us, that means not only recognising the completeness of a collection, but also focusing on how it differentiates itself and asserts its uniqueness in the international market.”
The Paris pipeline
While the past few seasons have witnessed a notable uptick in the fashion talent, Tokyo Fashion Week remains an incubator, with many designers still aiming to show abroad. The Fashion Prize of Tokyo, which supports one designer in taking their collection to the Paris runway and whose past winners include Auralee and ssstein, this season went to Norio Terada of Yoke. The designer will show his minimally minded menswear in Paris in January. The Tokyo Fashion Award recipients this season included the aforementioned Mukcyen, as well as Yohei Ohno and Kotoha Yokozawa — two well-known names on the domestic design scene. The eight designers who win each year are invited to hold a showroom in Paris and are supported with physical presentations in Tokyo the following season.
“Ten years ago, there were only a few designers showing runways in Paris, but now, we work to make sure that many Japanese designers have showrooms there,” says Imajo. JFWO also recently partnered with Pitti Uomo to facilitate Japan-based designers to show in Florence, he adds, and maintains ties with Paris’s Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode to “keep an eye out for our designers”.
A celebratory mood spread across Tokyo Fashion Week as it was announced on Wednesday that Soshi Otsuki took home the prestigious LVMH Prize. The designer’s Armani-esque tailoring, inspired by Japan’s bubble era of the 1980s, has marked him out as a serious player in the global fashion scene. Speaking over the phone from Paris, Otsuki said: “I was so nervous I don’t really remember [how it felt to win]. But Instagram and PR requests are crazy, we’re getting so many emails.” He plans to use the prize capital of €400,000 to invest in a bigger working space and more staff.
Otsuki’s success is Tokyo’s success. “International recognition plays a crucial role in reshaping domestic perceptions [of brands],” says Hashimoto. “When a Japanese designer wins something like the LVMH Prize, that validation abroad significantly elevates how they are seen at home.”
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