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Japan’s Anrealage closed out Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo (RFWT) on Saturday night with the debut of its menswear brand, Anrealage Homme, to much fanfare at the vast Telecom Center Building in Tokyo Bay. Designer Kunihiko Morinaga, who has shown womenswear in Paris for the past 10 years, lit the interior of the venue in pink for the occasion. He wanted to ensure the brand’s launch in Tokyo felt like an intentional moment.
“Because I usually show in Paris, some people might see showing the new menswear in Tokyo as a step back, but I don’t feel like that. There’s plenty of great things about Tokyo, and I want to continue showing the menswear here,” said Morinaga after the show. It was a fitting sentiment to end the week, which proved Tokyo’s promise as a fashion hub.
Insiders agreed it was the strongest that the event has felt in years. Tokyo Fashion Week struggled to bounce back after pandemic lockdowns, becoming more siloed in the global fashion week shuffle. Japan Fashion Week Organisation (JFWO), which heads the event, hadn’t sponsored international press and buyers to attend since 2019, before Covid-19. To fill the calendar, it became easier for designers to show, which cluttered the schedule. Last season, commentators said they felt Tokyo’s top brass would be more compelled to show at home if the bar to get on the schedule was higher.
Changes have been made since August. JFWO invited a handful of international press for the first time since 2019 — and introduced a glossy partnership with Porsche Japan to provide personal drivers to guests. Last season, 50 designers were on the schedule, but this time, they shaved it down to 43 (with the number of physical shows and presentations remaining the same at 35).
“This season, we got [stricter] on the selection committee and focused on more established designers,” says Kaoru Imajo, director of JFWO. “Before, we would have very small shows, or very young designer shows [on the schedule], but we thought that was not good for our fashion week branding, so we focused on more established designers.” The slight change made for a more undiluted showcase of some of the strongest design talent in Japan, with little distraction.
Other shifts levelled up the event. Designers like Kamiya found interesting venues off the beaten path to host their shows (Tokyo is notorious for repetitive venues), and Kota Gushiken injected energy with an unusual show format featuring comedians. Experts also noted this week was the most consistent the schedule has been in recent memory, with many familiar womenswear names (including Fetico, Viviano, Yohei Ohno, and Harunobu Murata) each showing for the past few seasons and managing to draw bigger crowds each time.
“That used to be the big difference between Milan, Paris, New York and Tokyo — they didn’t have any consistency [in Tokyo] before, but it’s definitely improving,” says Maiko Shibata, the creative director and buyer of luxury store Restir. “It means the brand storytelling is much stronger.”
Daiki Nakane, the director and menswear buyer at Tokyo Base, which stocks domestic brands, was equally impressed, citing an increased sense of grandeur at the shows in Tokyo. “I thought this week was amazing compared to previous years. I go to Paris quite often and used to feel a big difference between the power of shows there and in Japan, especially in terms of scale and production,” he says.
Japanese designer Tanaka’s show made for a big moment at the start of the week, with 685 guests, while veteran designer Mikio Sakabe held his show at the 1st Yoyogi National Gymnasium. Sakabe leveraged his considerable domestic fanbase, attracting around 4,000 guests to the vast venue and live streaming close-ups of the looks on the giant stadium screen so that everybody in the room had a chance to see.
Mixed execution
Still, attendees noted that though things felt grander this season, execution is mixed.
“Overall, my reaction has been pretty positive,” says Eugene Rabkin, the founder of independent fashion platform Style Zeitgeist, who was invited to the event by JFWO. He cites new workwear label Hidesign and womenswear designer Akiko Aoki as highlights but says others felt undercooked.
“A lot of it falls under good idea, bad execution,” he says. “Sometimes the fabrics are not on par with what they should be, which is strange considering the fabric resources in Japan — we all know a lot of established European designers who go to Japan to source fabrics.”
Joei Chung, a buyer at Lane Crawford, was also in town for fashion week, marking the first season since before the pandemic that buyers from the Hong Kong retail company attended the event. European fashion weeks and local showroom schedules in Hong Kong left little time and energy for Tokyo. Now, the department store has its eyes on the Japanese capital once more as the Chinese market softens, and Chung says a retail project is in the works to bring more Japanese labels into the fold. “Right now, we are very happy to be back again, and hopefully we’ll be coming back very often,” she says.
Maintaining momentum
One of Tokyo’s biggest challenges going forward is to maintain its newfound consistency. A small runway show in Tokyo can cost anywhere from 3 million JPY (approx £15,800), according to Imajo, with the bigger designers here spending upwards of 10.5 million JPY (almost £80,000).
Factoring this cost into the business is a major concern for designers, and many expressed doubts when asked if they’ll continue to show consistently every season because of financial constraints. “I want to keep showing, but it’s difficult to guarantee if I’ll be able to do it each time,” says designer Yohei Ohno, who runs an eponymous womenswear brand. This season, Ohno showed his collection in the Sen-Oku Hakukokan Museum, a venue provided by the general trading company Sumitomo Group as part of an ongoing relationship with Ohno, who designs the uniforms for the Osaka Expo.
Prizes can help too — the Tokyo Fashion Award, which affords six menswear and six womenswear designers each year one show in RFWT’s official venue, the Shibuya Hikarie, and also facilitates them to hold a showroom in Paris for two seasons — but it’s not unusual for a designer to slip straight off the schedule once the support stops.
Imajo admits that this is a challenge, but hopes that bolstering the presence of international attendees will help, and says inviting buyers with spending power is a key part of JFWO’s strategy for Tokyo Fashion Week. “We definitely want more buyers and people from showrooms, so we can support the business side of the brands,” he says.
For now, it stopped short of becoming overwhelming. “One thing I like about Tokyo Fashion Week is how everything feels on a human scale,” says Rabkin. “The same things go on [as] in Paris and New York: influencers are influencing, street style photographers are here, celebrities show up in borrowed finery, but there’s just much less of that, so it feels more manageable,” he says.
Like many insiders this season, the diverse show formats and buzzy atmosphere — thanks to more international presence — have made Kohei Hashimoto, a womenswear buyer at Isetan, optimistic about where RFWT will go from here. “It seems like everything has become much stronger this season, and step by step, it’s getting bigger and better. I think the future for Tokyo is looking bright.”
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Correction: This article was updated to correct the spelling of Yohei Ohno (18/3/24).
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