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Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo (RFWT) drew to a close on 2 September with an ebullient show of sherbet-coloured tulle from local designer Viviano Sue. It was a colourful end to a sweltering week as Japan recorded its hottest summer on record.
It’s been three years since the Japan Fashion Week Organization (JFWO) moved the Spring/Summer shows from October to August. Despite the higher temperatures, JFWO says the earlier timing has worked well. “For a lot of the men’s designers, October was too late for the production of Spring/Summer, and the rest of the fashion weeks were over, so the buyers said they were out of budget [by the time Tokyo came around],” says Kaoru Imajo, director of JFWO. “So far, the new schedule is working out much better.”
There were 50 designers on the schedule this season, with 35 physical runway shows and presentations and the rest showing digitally (last year, 58 designers took part). Moments of excitement populated the six-day event, including a runway show from streetwear brand A Bathing Ape (Bape) and notable debuts from the likes of local brands Kanako Sakai and Meanswhile. Yet, some attendees said the overall quality was lower than it could be and pointed to a lack of international visitors.
JFWO used to pay for select international press and buyers to attend, but this stopped during the pandemic. “We want to invite more editors and buyers, but we haven’t been able to recently because of budget restrictions,” says Imajo. He is keen to get more global power players over in the near future but is hesitant to make any promises.
While challenges remain, Tokyo Fashion Week is showing signs of recovery, says American design and retail consultant Nick Wooster, who has been a judge for the Tokyo Fashion Award for the past decade. This season felt like a post-lockdown bounce-back. “It wasn’t the most inspiring season I’ve ever seen, but there have been a few things that have been really good,” he says, pointing to menswear brands Seven By Seven and Meanswhile as standouts. “Obviously, Covid threw a wrench in the works, but this season felt the most normal that I’ve seen since pre-2020. It really felt like things were back on track.”
The biggest moment of the week came from Bape, whose show was sponsored by Japanese technology conglomerate Rakuten — also headline sponsor of Tokyo Fashion Week — as part of its ‘By R’ programme (which has in the past supported shows by designers, including Undercover by Jun Takahashi and Takahiro Miyashita The Soloist). Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the streetwear brand put on a star-studded show that drew some big domestic names, including model Koki and singer Genki Iwahashi. The event took place at the Yoyogi National Gymnasium and sent a streetwear-clad army of models down the runway alongside a giant monkey mascot and an army of sharks with inflatable wings.
The strategy to invest in bigger brand moments makes sense for Rakuten, which leveraged the BAPE show to drive traffic to its Rakuten Fashion e-commerce platform, where it had made the collection available for pre-order. “We made full use of digital technology to distribute videos [of the show] domestically and internationally, including in China,” says Ryo Matsumura, the head of Rakuten Fashion and a senior vice president at the company. “We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the magnitude of the response.”
New talent to watch
Tokyo does a lot to incubate homegrown talent, and there were multiple prizes announced throughout the week. Kanako Sakai, who opened fashion week with a debut runway show that featured her innovative textiles (one was created from iridescent crushed shells in an age-old Kyoto technique), received the JFW Next Brand award, which finances two runway shows.
Shinpei Goto’s streetwear brand Masu won the Fashion Prize of Tokyo (previous winners include Tomo Koizumi and Mame Kurogouchi).
The Tokyo Fashion Award, which supports emerging brands to do a show in Tokyo and exhibit their collections in the Paris showrooms, is presented to eight designers each year, split evenly across men’s and womenswear. 2023’s winners included Mister It, whose designer Takuya Isagawa previously worked at Maison Martin Margiela, and Shinya Kozuka, whose popular menswear show this season featured oversized tailoring printed with his unique sketches and was inspired by the blue and gold colours of The Premium Malt’s beer cans. “There’s definitely some great talent,” says awards judge Wooster. “Last year, we picked Khoki, which is a really great brand, and I feel like there’s always a star who comes out. That’s what’s exciting about being part of this programme.”
Previous Tokyo Fashion Award winners, such as apparel brands Irenisa and Fetico, have managed to pick up more stockists in Asia through the scheme, but many have yet to attract buyers in the West, and there’s a sense among designers that more could be done to market the award abroad. “It’s not easy to get clients in Europe and America with the award system as it stands,” says one previous award recipient, who wished to remain anonymous. “The PRs organising the awards are Japanese, so they don’t always have many connections with Europeans. I wonder if the best way to get more stockists there is to get European PRs or others to help.”
Viviano Sue, who received the Tokyo Fashion Award last season, says he has struggled to attract buyer interest in Europe despite the win. “The ladies showroom [in Paris] is just about to start, and we have three days with no appointments for any of the brands yet.”
There have been some success stories. Minimal menswear brand Auralee, a previous winner of the Fashion Prize of Tokyo, is bought by numerous Western e-tailers, including Ssense and Mytheresa, while punky label Kidill, which won the Tokyo Fashion Award in 2022, drew buzz to its showroom and won a few international orders last season. “More can be done with the PR of the showroom, but I think, after all, it’s down to the designers to appeal more to the Western market,” says JFWO’s Imajo.
Elena Kirioukhina, a consultant in New York and who works closely with the Japanese market, says there are cultural elements of taste and sensibility to consider. “Designers who design in Japan design for Japanese sensibility and culture; they don’t design for worldwide expansion,” she says. “What they do for the brands in Paris is great, but unfortunately, it doesn’t [always] lead to results. You need to bring people from outside [into Tokyo],” she says.
Improving Tokyo Fashion Week’s standing
Some attendees argue that more could be done to raise the profile of Tokyo Fashion Week, which would, in turn, boost Japanese designers on the international stage. One grumble is that the event takes place over six days, which means there are a lot of designers on the schedule, and the smallest ones can struggle to fill their front rows.
“It would be better if brands had to work hard to get on the schedule, and the collection period was set to three days instead of a week so that only the better brands could participate,” says Masu designer Goto, whose clothes have been worn by A$AP Rocky, and for the past few seasons has mostly chosen to show off-schedule. “I think the Tokyo collections aren’t going to improve unless the criteria and screening processes are made more stringent.”
Tatsuya Yamaguchi, a brand consultant who works with many Tokyo menswear designers on creative direction, echoes this sentiment. “The hurdle to get your name in the official Tokyo Fashion Week calendar [in order to do a show] is not high at all,” he says, adding that the official schedule lost out on cooler menswear brands such as Masu, Dairiku and Attachment, who all showed earlier in the year to be closer to the international men’s schedule. “If it became cooler to show at fashion week here, people would consider it as an option. Even if the timing was difficult, they would make an effort to get into the schedule, but that’s not the case right now,” he says.
Hyke designer Hideaki Yoshihara says global momentum for RFWT that was building around five years ago was derailed by the pandemic. However, he plans to stay on the schedule for now because “it makes more logistical sense” as a Japanese brand. “Tokyo, in general, is amazing for fashion from a consumer point of view, but at the moment, I feel like the best of Tokyo is not being represented at Tokyo Fashion Week,” he says. “Still, I’m hopeful for the future.”
Imajo is aware of these issues. “We have been talking about [refining the schedule] inside the JFWO for more than 10 years, but unfortunately, it hasn’t happened,” he says. First, there are the optics to consider: “In the past, one of our barometers to measure the success of a season was the media coverage numbers and advertisement conversion numbers, so if the number of the participating brands decreases, these numbers will also decrease, which means that the fashion week looks to have become weaker,” says Imajo. He adds that RFWT is also keen to support young brands.
Now that Tokyo has returned to a version of post-lockdown normality, a shift in strategy may be forthcoming. “We have not always allowed all the brands to participate. And since the pandemic situation has now got easier, some things may change,” he says.
Even with the long-term challenges RFWT faces, this season, there was a sense of positivity among Japan’s domestic buyers. “I was especially happy to see so many brands that were doing shows for the first time this year, and I felt that they had a clear idea of what they really wanted to do,” says Yukari Negishi, women’s director of Ron Herman Japan (the fashion retailer has thirteen outlets spread across the country), who noted Kanako Sakai and Seven by Seven as brands who made an impression this season.
The proportion of domestic brands Ron Herman carries has increased in recent seasons to around 40 per cent. Negishi predicts this will continue to rise. “It’s not that I’m intentionally trying to increase the number of Japanese brands, but the number has naturally increased as I’ve been buying unique, interesting and well-made products,” she says.
Maiko Shibata, creative director of Restir, a high-end boutique in Roppongi, noted that this season has felt more polished, noting Fetico’s lingerie-inspired clothing and Harunobu Murata’s womenswear as good examples. “A lot of collections are more mature than before,” she says. “Tokyo Fashion Week used to be more for beginners and or very young designers, but now the brands see a wider view, or maybe a more global view. It’s slightly more professional than before.”
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