Become a Vogue Business Member to receive unlimited access to Member-only reporting and insights, our Beauty and TikTok Trend Trackers, Member-only newsletters and exclusive event invitations.
This season marks 20 years since the beginning of Tokyo Fashion Week as we know it today. Fashion shows have been taking place in the Japanese capital since the 1980s (brands from Comme des Garçons to Undercover showed their earliest collections in the city), but it was only in 2005 that the event was established in its current format. Headed up by the Japan Fashion Week Organization (JFWO) and backed by the Japan Apparel Industry Council and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), the event has since become one of Asia’s most significant showcases for fashion talent, and remains a crucial incubator for Japan’s next generation of designers.
Here’s a look back at how the week has developed over the past two decades and where it stands now.
The people
Speaking at a celebration for the event that took place by the riverside in Tokyo Bay to kick off the Spring/Summer 2026 showcase, Hiroshi Komoda, secretary general of JFWO, looked back to the beginning. “The first time we held fashion week back in 2005, it attracted an incredible 45,000 people and got off to a great start,” he says, adding that late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was Chief Cabinet Secretary at the time, was among the early attendees. “It began with the idea of promoting Japanese fashion to the world, and that’s how we’ve gotten to where we are today.”
Hirofumi Kurino, co-founder of United Arrows, was part of the cohort of industry figures who helped launch the event. “We thought, how can we make Tokyo Fashion Week a charming place to be? Because we had no big names: no Comme des Garçons, no Issey Miyake, no Yohji Yamamoto,” Kurino says. “So I said, why don’t we promote the younger or independent brands? The first few years were not easy. But step by step, we had success in introducing the young generation. And especially in recent years, it’s become very fruitful.”
Japanese fashion customers are becoming harder to define. They are also spending less. We asked industry insiders to explain how tastes and norms are shifting.
Hundreds of designers have come through the week: Mikio Sakabe, founder of his eponymous brand and the Grounds footwear line, has been a key figure in uniting designers and mentoring new talent in Tokyo. “Mikio Sakabe and [his wife, designer] Jenny Fax pioneered a new generation of designers,” says Kumiko Takano, a fashion professor at Meiji University and founder of Tokyo-based publication Across. Sakabe’s own beginning was in 2007 as part of a group showcase that included Taro Horiuchi (now the creative director of Kolor) and Writtenafterwards by Yoshikazu Yamagata, who founded seminal fashion school Coconogacco alongside Sakabe. (The school has produced some of Tokyo’s brightest new stars, including Soshi Otsuki, a finalist for this year’s LVMH Prize.)
International designers have also been part of the mix since the start, with some more surprising than others. For the showcase in 2007, Sakabe invited two edgy young Antwerp graduates: Helena Lumelsky and a then-unknown Demna Gvasalia. The duo’s presentation under their brand Stereotypes — which featured a collection based on tropes such as school teachers and bouncers — showed the early seeds of the collections that would later shake the entire global industry. “I have no idea what happened to the clothes — they’re all still in Japan somewhere!” says Lumelsky, who returned to Tokyo to show in the city under her own brand, Lena Lumelsky, in 2017, and is currently working on a new project with Grounds.
The sponsors
Throughout its tenure, Tokyo Fashion Week has been supported by three major sponsors that have reflected the shifts in fashion’s funding model: Mercedes-Benz (2011 to 2015), Amazon (2016 to 2019) and Rakuten (2020 to present). The current sponsor focuses on e-commerce tie-ins and its By R initiative, which funds the show of a prominent designer each season (for SS26, it will be Fetico).
Mami Osugi, a fashion editor and member of the JFW Next Brand Award selection committee, points to some of the high-profile shows that the week has hosted, including Toga’s 20th anniversary show at the National Art Center, a joint presentation by Sacai and Undercover in 2017, and a Rakuten-supported Kolor show for SS22 that was staged inside a moving train. “Those presentations by brands that command a strong presence in the global market had both impact and significance, precisely because they took place here at home [in Japan],” Osugi says.
Tatsuya Yamaguchi, a Tokyo-based creative director, began attending shows in Tokyo in the early 2010s, and has seen it change from a more corporate enterprise to a trusted showcase of Tokyo’s brightest budding stars. “The emergence of young designers and the diversification of show production has happened gradually,” Yamaguchi says.
The week has been a slow burner, and while it has remained under the radar on the global fashion scene, many of the young designers have been able to build viable businesses through the platform by exposure to Asian press and buyers. “Japanese designers have made an effort to blend their authentic selves with expressions and presentations in a global language, considering not just the domestic market, but how to become international brands in their own right,” says Yamaguchi.
The obstacles
Tokyo Fashion Week has also weathered its fair share of disasters: most notably the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, and the Covid pandemic — both of which caused numerous cancellations and postponements. Hikaru Shiga, founder of fashion PR company Ten10, remembers his first fashion week during the SS12 season, which was delayed due to the natural disaster. “Tokyo was full of chaos and anxiety,” he says. “I found the resilience of the designers hugely inspiring.”
The pandemic that began in 2020 also shocked Japan’s industry, but it provided some of the country’s biggest designers with the chance to show back home. Undercover’s Jun Takahashi, who usually shows his collections in Paris, was one of them — and showed during Tokyo Fashion Week on the official schedule for AW21, supported by Rakuten. Inspired by the seminal (and appropriately apocalyptic) anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, the showcase featured light-up robot masks and became one of Takahashi’s most notable shows of the past decade. “It took us away from reality for a moment,” says Yamaguchi. “I really felt the power of what a fashion show could do.”
Today
As fashion week kicks off for the SS26 season, the current mood in Tokyo is buoyant and healthy, with emerging brands Pillings, Fetico and newcomer Mukcyen pegged to be highlights. “Compared to 10 years ago, I feel that more brands have solid sales, unique strengths and benefit more from various incubation programmes [and prizes],” says Osugi. A new cohort of prize winners will be announced in the coming week, following in the footsteps of some of Tokyo’s biggest exports, including Hiromichi Ochiai’s Facetasm and Masayuki Ino’s Doublet, the latter of which won the LVMH Prize in 2018. Ino currently shows in Paris, but says he’d love to return to Tokyo again one day: “It’s more fun in Tokyo!”
In four short years, Fetico’s Emi Funayama has brought a new kind of sensuality to the Japanese fashion market, turning £10,000 of savings into a seven-figure business in the process. Here, she lays out how she did it.
A consistent name on the Tokyo schedule is Yoshio Kubo, who joined the official line-up in 2010, and will show his SS26 collection later this week. “As time has gone on, it seems like more designers want to be part of Tokyo Fashion Week, which I think is a great trend,” he says.
Hiroko Koshino, something of a local industry legend, is the event’s most-attended designer and has shown on the schedule 30 times. “[Before Tokyo Fashion Week] we wondered why the world wouldn’t recognise us [designers] unless we held our collections in Paris, and worried if Japan was a good enough platform. I think in those 20 years we’ve worked hard to make something special,” says the designer, now 88. “Even amid all of the struggles, the fact that young people here are so energetic and enjoying fashion proves that Tokyo is finally becoming a global fashion city.”
While plenty has changed over the past two decades, there is much about Tokyo Fashion Week that has stayed the same. “At the end of a show here, the designer always comes out to give a modest greeting, which is always followed by quiet applause,” says Shiga. “It somehow feels quintessentially Japanese, doesn’t it?”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
More from this author:
‘It’s better not to go viral’: Inside the business of cult designer Mihara Yasuhiro
