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At Paris Fashion Week this season, Tokyo-based brand Anrealage — known for its technologically innovative runway presentations — drew gasps of awe from the audience by inflating nylon dresses into huge, avant-garde shapes after incorporating electric fans into the fabric. Naming the collection ‘Wind’, designer Kunihiko Morinaga explained that his puffed-up dresses were circulated with air to create revolutionary new silhouettes, but also to keep wearers cool.
The collection — which was a collaboration with Japanese air-conditioned workwear manufacturer Kuchofuku — comes at a pertinent time. This summer was the planet’s hottest on record, according to Copernicus, the EU’s climate service. This has worrying implications for public health: the World Health Organisation reports that heat stress is the leading cause of weather-related deaths, with the number of people exposed to extreme heat around the world rising “exponentially” because of climate change. It’s also bad for business: according to The Lancet, heat exposure led to the loss of 470 billion potential labour hours in 2021.
Air-conditioned clothing could offer an answer. “By showing air-conditioned clothes in Paris, we hope to be able to suggest new physical forms, but also a sustainable solution to hot weather,” says Morinaga, adding that air-conditioned clothing, with fans powered by pocket-sized batteries, can be used to reduce the CO2 that would usually be omitted to keep people a comfortable temperature in large buildings.
Though extraordinary on the runway, jackets whirring with cooling fans are already a common sight on blue-collar workers in Japan during the country’s humid summer period. First brought to market in 2004 by Hiroshi Ichigaya, a former Sony engineer and the founder behind Kuchofuku, the technology works by circulating air internally around the garment via two small fans at the waist, evaporating sweat and thus keeping the wearer cool. Now ubiquitous on everyone from construction workers to traffic controllers in Japan (and edging into other markets, such as China and the US), fan-powered clothing is yet to be adopted by the general public.
That could be about to change.
Winds of change
According to Kuchofuku, the domestic market for air-conditioned clothing in Japan is currently at JPY 16 billion ($107 million), and is predicted to grow to between JPY 20-30 billion ($134-201 million) in the next few years. “From around 2010, it spread to people on construction sites through word of mouth and has grown significantly,” says Tomoyuki Iwabuchi, PR officer for Kuchofuku, adding that they have begun slowly expanding into China, Taiwan and the US.
Potential for new growth, however, may lie in brands who are incorporating the technology into fashion collections, with the aim to broaden the appeal to fashion consumers. Though its project with Anrealage was its most spectacular to date, Kuchofuku has lent its tech to brands including Junya Watanabe, Y-3 and Nike x Off-White in the past few years. These partnerships are part of a concerted effort by the company to break out of the workwear space. “Our mission is to spread the word about air-conditioned clothing to a wider audience,” says Iwabuchi. “We’re now reaching a point where it’s becoming part of the lifestyle and fashion world.”
Utilitarian menswear brand Meanswhile is another example. The label’s designer Naohiro Fujisaki first noticed air-con jackets six years ago on construction workers he saw in the streets, and reached out to Kuchofuku soon after. “We thought it could be incorporated into fashion and everyday life,” says Fujisaki. When Meanswhile released its first air-con jacket five years ago, it was a good gimmick from a PR perspective, he continues, but it didn’t necessarily resonate with the end user. In recent seasons, however, interest has picked up.
“Now it seems to have become more widely known, we’ve been selling more since last year,” he says. The brand has been putting out around 100 units each season, which have so far sold out, and Fujisaki says that he intends to increase his output of the fan jackets threefold from next season. His latest iteration is an air-conditioned rain jacket, priced at $1,012; intended to be all-weather appropriate, he sells it in Korea, Germany, the US and the UK, as well as in Japan.
Other innovators are emerging. Hidesign, a Japanese workwear company founded in 2005 that provides pragmatically designed uniforms to fast food workers and airline engineers among others, began creating collections and showing at Tokyo Fashion Week last year in an attempt to expand from workwear into the high fashion space. The company incorporated its own fan technology, called Air Flow Wear, into its Spring/Summer 2025 collection in the form of bright blue vests and jackets that would delight the average gorpcore fashion enthusiast. “We’re currently working to suppress the large, puffy shape. If the airflow is weaker then it won’t expand that much, but it’s also no good if it’s not cool enough,” says Hidesign president and head designer Hideo Yoshii, adding that the company is currently working on patterns that will maximise the benefits of the garments.
Wearable tech is also evolving. Sony’s Reon Pocket, for example, is a portable cooling device that clips around the neck. Invented in 2019 and now on its fifth generation, the Reon can detect when the wearer is walking to automatically adjust the cooling power, and even has a warming function for when the mercury dips. Other innovations, including water-cooler pipes incorporated into garments, are potential areas Yoshii sees the space evolving in. “We would like to try these various gadgets in the future, but at present, the electric fan is the most safe and stable,” he says.
Will it go global?
To appeal more to the international market, Hidesign is planning to show at Pitti Uomo in January, in order to push its Air Flow Wear jackets to a wider pool of buyers. “We are thinking very realistically about how to expand business overseas,” says Souta Yamaguchi, Hidesign’s fashion director and a former stylist at Anrealage. “We’ll see what happens at Pitti and if the reaction is good, we would like to continue to show in Europe.”
Fujisaki is making similar moves. “The response is better overseas,” he says. “In Japan, there is a strong impression that it is for people working on construction sites and it is not exactly fashionable, so the challenge for Japanese customers is how we can evolve the design; but overseas, it’s seen as new, cutting-edge functional clothing.” When the Meanswhile team went to Paris during the men’s season, they all wore their air-con jackets and turned heads around the city. “We went to Dover Street Market and everyone was asking us about [the jackets],” he says. “I get the impression that people are quite interested in the tech, they think it’s amazing.”
Ian Paley, owner of Notting Hill boutique Garbstore, picked up Meanswhile’s air-con jackets for the SS24 season, going as far as to obtain the accreditation required to ship the lithium batteries that come with the jackets. While the response from his customers has been positive, Paley says nobody in the UK is picking up a jacket for its body-cooling benefits. “People appreciate the mix of [style and] technology, but at this point in time I think it’s very much a curiosity,” he says. Still, Paley agrees that the implications for how we dress for the weather are huge. “We’re right at the start of it. The technology of the ventilation jackets is currently at its crudest point. I think there’s a long arc ahead, but I can certainly see a time where it becomes more normal, and it will happen in Japan first.”
Yamaguchi is doing his part to set the trend. “I actually bought the Air Flow jacket for myself this season,” he says. “I’ll just wear it out on the streets because it’s cool, and the people around me say it’s cool too.” He wasn’t talking about the temperature.
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