Japan is known for being one of the most fashion-forward places on the planet. Does it deserve its reputation?
In the past, Japanese fashion customers were known for their deep loyalty to luxury brands and adventurous street style — well documented in magazines like Street and Fruits — but today they are somewhat harder to define. Tokyo Fashion Week has attracted more attention in recent seasons, with a new generation of breakout designers adding vibrancy to the event, but Japan’s most successful brands still show in Paris, meaning the outside concept of what Japanese style means is set by the same five or six designers each season.
On the ground, the fashion landscape is changing. Japan’s luxury fashion market has remained largely robust despite a wider downturn, though Japanese tourists are travelling abroad much less than they were pre-Covid, and cutting spending on clothing as the cost of living continues to outpace wage increases. At a cautious time in fashion, how can international brands and retailers maintain relevance? And what are the trends informing consumer choices today?
To understand how tastes and norms are shifting, Vogue Business asked a series of industry insiders at Tokyo Fashion Week to learn what style in Japan looks like right now.
Hirofumi Kurino, co-founder and creative advisor of United Arrows
Step by step in Japan, we’re moving away from logos, away from the luxury brands and away from the idea of trends. Young people are wearing what they want, and thanks to the quality of secondhand shops in Japan they can find very nice clothes at low prices, so they have no need for fast fashion. There’s less prejudice around fashion too; men can wear pink, no issues.
I’ve been working in fashion for nearly 50 years, and I’ve seen things become much more elegant recently. For instance, the young kids now are fed up with trainers and have found the charm of leather shoes. In Japan, we are very good at maintaining our shoes — it’s kind of zen, a way to destress from a hectic lifestyle. It’s the same for old records and vintage clothes, we take care of things here.
A friend said to me recently that Japan will become a benchmark for a post-consumerist world. In the West and in emerging Asian countries, people still buy, buy, throw away, waste; but in Japan, that feels like nonsense. This idea of not wasting, we call it mottainai. It’s in our DNA to care for things more.
Kaoru Imajo, director of Japan Fashion Week Organisation
Tokyo style is a mixture. We have punk, luxury, high fashion, American traditional vintage and denim, and then Uniqlo and Muji — everything is mixed together here. It’s the same thing as our food — like how we mix pasta with natto [fermented soybeans]. It might sound weird, but it ends up being really good.
Even though Japan is usually known for its menswear, we’ve also seen a lot of interesting womenswear designers rising lately, such as Viviano, Fetico, Harunobu Murata, Chika Kisada and Akiko Aoki. The fashion week schedule includes more strong womenswear than ever.
Momo Angela, street style photographer at Vogue Runway
If you look back at Fruits and Harajuku style in the early 2000s, it had such a strong punchiness to it, because it was so uncommon and it was so new to people. But nowadays, it’s more subtle and simple. We don’t have anything that defines ‘Japanese style’ in the same way. Of course, a lot of people wear Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons, or Noir Kei Ninomiya, but then a lot of people are also wearing more casual sportswear and Adidas Sambas. I see a lot of girls wearing Grounds sneakers by Mikio Sakabe, too. I haven’t seen them that much in Europe, I feel like they’re a Tokyo thing.
Japan is also good at balance. Asian countries are starting to categorise their own body shapes [with something called the ‘skeletal type’] — wave shape, straight shape or natural shape, and considering this more with how they dress. It’s the same with colour, they’ll choose colours depending on their skin tone and whether they have a blue base or yellow base, for example. The difference in Japan is that people don’t try to copy what others are wearing, they get inspired and then convert it into their own style. It’s more personalised.
Yu Masui, fashion journalist and consultant
People focus more on the domestic market in Japan. One reason is that imported clothes are expensive and the exchange rate is really bad at the moment, so young people can’t afford the European brands. But there’s enough domestic offering anyway. And it’s more edgy, it’s more special, and in terms of quality it’s good, too. That’s something Japan can be proud of.
What’s refreshing about Tokyo Fashion Week is there’s not so much of an influencer culture or celebrity marketing. When you go to the shows in Paris, people are dressed by the luxury brands to attend the shows, but it’s not because they love the brand, it’s just because they’re famous or have lots of followers. That’s a good thing about Tokyo, it’s more about the clothes — here, we’re more face to face with what designers want to say.
Motofumi ‘Poggy’ Kogi, menswear curator
My generation grew up with a culture of select shops [Japanese multi-brand boutiques], and I think in Japan we’re accustomed to seeing all the best things from around the world and mixing them together to create our own sense of originality.
Quiet luxury might have become a trend in the wider fashion world, but in Japan it’s been part of our culture for a very long time. [Popular menswear newcomer] Auralee is a great example — there are a lot of people in Japan who dress that way, in simple, high-quality items, regardless of what the trend of the moment is. I think there are also a lot of customers in Japan who understand the craftsmanship and the background and history of how things are made.
In terms of upcoming Japanese designers, Stein [which makes innovatively designed quiet luxury clothing] could be the next big thing. I think it’s a next-generation brand that can further expand the path that Auralee has paved for the new wave of Japanese designers.
Maiko Shibata, creative director and head buyer of Restir
I was in Seoul recently and I saw so many young Japanese girls shopping there. The markup system and wholesale system is different in Korea, so Japanese girls can go there via LCC [low-cost domestic airline] and just shop because the prices are cheaper. The look they go for is super tight T-shirts, fluffy balloon skirts, Adidas sweatshirts and Samba sneakers with lots of decorative ribbons and keychains — they try to style themselves similar to their favourite K-pop idols.
For the older generation in Japan, it’s still pretty conservative. In general it’s less colour, more muted. The Row is very popular. When people have money they want to wear super fun pieces, but the economy isn’t great right now, so people don’t want to take risks in how they dress. During fashion week in Tokyo, it’s a little different. We see lots of people who are interested in fashion or the fashion students, so they are more unique and more aggressive with how they dress. But that’s why Tokyo is good, because there’s more freedom here, there’s more choice.
Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
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