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For a Japanese designer, holding a catwalk show in Europe is, at least from the outside, a veritable marker of success. The well-trodden path from Tokyo to Paris — beginning with Kenzō Takada and Issey Miyake in the 1970s and followed by Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons’s Rei Kawakubo in the 1980s — is still seen as a worthy pilgrimage today, undertaken by everyone from Undercover’s Jun Takahashi to Sacai’s Chitose Abe.
And then there’s Mihara Yasuhiro. Though his name isn’t dropped as often as some of his Japanese peers also on the Paris schedule, the footwear and menswear designer is one of the most successful independent designers in the Asia-Pacific. This week marks 20 years since Mihara, now 52, first sent his clothes down a runway outside of Japan, but, ever the rebel, he didn’t do it in Paris. “All the other Japanese designers showing overseas did it at Paris Fashion Week. It was like a status symbol, and I was a little embarrassed by it; I didn’t want to walk the same path, so I went to Milan,” the designer tells Vogue Business from his Tokyo studio a few days before his Spring/Summer 2025 show.
Mihara’s clothing, a mishmash of counter-cultural references that typically comprise beat-up cargo pants, MA1 bombers, faded flannels and grungy cardigans, define his fashion shows, but it’s the footwear that makes up 70 per cent of sales and propels the business. In 2019, he released his now-iconic Peterson OG sole court shoe, which resembles a Jack Purcell Converse sneaker with a clay-like sole that looks as though it has been melted in a microwave.
The brand has six stores in Japan, 80 domestic wholesale accounts and a further 130 internationally. Over the past five years, sales have increased more than fivefold. The designer told Vogue Business that annual sales currently stand at “billions of yen”, representing eight figures in US dollar terms. On the Maison Mihara Yasuhiro website, every size in every colour of the Peterson OG is currently sold out, with a note saying that prices are set to “be revised” on 22 June.
Building a cult following
Yasuhiro Mihara was born in 1972 in Nagasaki. Growing up in Fukuoka, he was raised by his mother, a painter, and his father, a vaccine researcher for chickens: “We had about 30 chickens at home. I grew up surrounded by them,” he says. Influenced by his older brother who took him surfing and to disco clubs, Mihara quickly developed the taste that would come to define his signature design aesthetic. “Hip-hop was just starting to emerge and the fashion was really cool at the time, so I tried to copy it,” he says. Mihara wore military-style cargo pants and MA1 bomber jackets, “which were really popular among surfers”, paired against baggy chinos and white sneakers, so that his silhouette appeared “snowman-like”.
After venturing deep into the local alternative scene, embracing acid house and rave culture, he became a drummer in a niche noisecore band in Fukuoka. (At his AW20 Paris show he ‘assaulted’ guests’ eardrums with a music rehearsal soundtrack: “No sentient being should have to listen to that,” wrote Tina Isaac-Goizé in her review of the collection for Vogue Runway.)
At 18, Mihara moved to Tokyo to study textiles at Tama Art University. He was inspired by radical designers John Moore (shoes) and Christopher Nemeth (fashion), who were members of the London-based design collective that resided in the avant-garde studio House of Beauty and Culture. Mihara started making shoes out of scrap materials and discarded leather, selling them under the name Archidoom before rebranding to his own name in 1997. “At that time, the popular brands were Undercover, Bape and Comme des Garçons. The only people in Japan who were using their own names were Issey [Miyake] and Yohji [Yamamoto],” he says. “I didn’t want to make a brand name, but I was worried that Yasuhiro Mihara was a little difficult to say.”
Branding for Japanese designers is notoriously problematic — many fail to appeal to both the domestic and international markets with names that struggle to transcend the language barrier. Hirofumi Kurino, co-founder of Japanese brand United Arrows and a renowned industry guru, suggested Mihara invert his name because it would be easier for foreigners to wrap their tongues around — and Mihara Yasuhiro was born. “It’s thanks to Kurino san that I used this name,” he says. The English-speaking market took a few years to warm up, however, and spent a while thinking that Mihara was either a woman or a type of food or misunderstanding his name entirely. “I was introduced as ‘Miharaya Suhiro’ by Selfridges. I still remember that,” he laughs.
Clothing was a natural progression, and by November 1999 Mihara was showing full collections at Tokyo Fashion Week and had started his own company, Sosu. An explosively successful sneaker collaboration with Puma followed. “I actually called Nike and Adidas first, but they said they only make shoes for athletes and had nothing to do with fashion, so Puma was the only one that was interested,” he recalls. It turned out to be a prescient collaboration — so prescient it wasn’t even called a collaboration back then, but a “double-name sneaker” — pre-empting the hypebeast boom that would later arrive. Limited to 2000 pairs to mark the turn of the millennium, the double-name sneakers sold out in two days. Mihara had mixed feelings. “I had a bit of a crisis when I realised that my designs for Puma had become famous first, and no one knew about my own brand,” he says.
The Puma collab provided Mihara with the funds to put his name on the global fashion map. His first show outside of Japan took place in June 2004 at Milan Fashion Week and he joined the Paris schedule four seasons later. Ever since, he has built a reputation for being one of the most consistently interesting Japanese designers on-schedule. His cult following spans veteran fashion insiders to sneaker-obsessed teens: TikTok is awash with (literally) millions of videos that mention the designer, referring to his shoes simply as “Miharas”.
Mentoring the next generation
Mihara is a regular presence on Tokyo’s fashion scene — his once-black bowl cut now a shock of silver that makes him easy to spot in a crowd — and is well-known for dispensing wisdom to the younger generation as a kind of fashion senpai, or mentor. He recently began working with two fledgling Japanese brands, menswear designer Kamiya and womenswear talent Keisuke Yoshida, to provide support. “We pay their salary, we pay the running costs of their runway shows, we do sales and PR, and we also do production management,” says Mihara.
This isn’t charity, he flags, but an investment the designer hopes will pay off. “I’m thinking realistically here. I’m in my 50s now and one of the things I like is seeing new generations coming up,” he explains.
Yoshida — a 32-year-old building a reputation as one of Japan’s most talented young womenswear designers — has found the assistance from Mihara life-changing. “Until now, we’ve been running on a tight budget. With the flow of funds into the company, the know-how that Mihara has, we’ve been able to start running ourselves as a proper company,” Yoshida says. “We’ve been aiming to expand overseas for several seasons, and that has now become a reality for us.” He plans to hold a showroom in Paris from January next year and will expand the brand’s line-up to include items “that were previously out of reach, such as leather products, bags and shoes”. If this goes well, Yoshida hopes to present his collections in Paris. “We finally feel like we can go global.”
The kind of help Mihara can offer comes at a difficult time for Japan’s young designers. Like every fashion capital, Tokyo has high rents, with no affordable real estate available in shopping hubs like Harajuku or Omotesando. “For many younger designers nowadays, e-commerce is their only option,” says Mihara. “It’s very difficult to grow with e-comm, because you have less contact with customers. It’s harder to convey your world view and your market share becomes very narrow. Some brands can be successful online, but they don’t usually last long.”
Despite the popularity of his shoes online, Mihara has never intentionally tried to court hypebeasts or viral attention, and warns against it. “The more a brand grows by going viral on the internet, the faster it will decline. I know that very well,” he says. “I would say that it’s better to do business in a way that doesn’t create buzz or go viral. It’s better to go slowly, and steadily rise.”
One of the designer’s favourite fashion business analogies is that selling clothes is like selling cake. “I always say that [while] a cake can be rich and beautiful with decoration, it also needs flavour and texture,” he says. “It’s the same with fashion. No matter how creative it appears at first, fashion is no good if it’s not also a joy to wear. You can’t run a business by selling cakes that look better than they taste.”
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