At Tokyo’s prestigious Bunka Fashion College, college students focus in silence that’s damaged solely by the sound of scissors and stitching machines as they try to emulate the worldwide success of alumni like Kenzo.
The lack of greats Kenzo Takada and Issey Miyake heralds the tip of a fashion period, many years after Japanese design revolutionised Parisian catwalks within the Nineteen Seventies and ’80s.
And the French capital stays a aim for rising expertise like Bunka graduate Takuya Morikawa, whose streetwear-inspired tailoring made its Paris Fashion Week debut two years in the past.
Morikawa, 40, hopes his reveals on the trade’s high occasion will result in “an amazing future, beyond my wildest dreams”.
Before launching his label TAAKK in 2013, Morikawa spent eight years at Miyake’s studio, the place he labored on runway collections and the well-known “Pleats Please” line, but additionally harvested rice and made paper to find out about conventional craft strategies.
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He instructed AFP he was saddened by Miyake’s demise this summer time, however implored youthful designers to not really feel disheartened.
“We need to do our best to not let these designers’ deaths impact the fashion world. If that happens, it means we’re doing our job badly,”
he mentioned.
One of the massive names choosing up the baton is Nigo, who shot to fame within the Nineteen Nineties along with his streetwear model A Bathing Ape.
The designer, who additionally studied at Bunka and whose actual title is Tomoaki Nagao, was named inventive director at Kenzo final yr, after founder Takada died of Covid-19 in 2020.
Another Japanese label having fun with worldwide success is Sacai, based in 1999 by Chitose Abe, who was tapped as the primary visitor couture designer for Jean Paul Gaultier.
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‘Goosebumps’
Kenzo and textile visionary Miyake grew to become massively influential by pursuing their ardour in Paris, as did high fashion trailblazer Hanae Mori, who died in August.
Left holding the torch are Yohji Yamamoto, now 79, and 80-year-old Rei Kawakubo, founding father of Comme des Garcons, who shook up the fashion institution within the early Eighties.
New challenges, together with the huge vary of kinds now out there for each style, have made it more durable for rising designers to seize international consideration, in keeping with Bunka president Sachiko Aihara.
“The world was shocked” by avant-garde Japanese design, she mentioned, recalling how her college students started to decorate in black after Yamamoto launched his first monochromatic clothes line.
“But we no longer live in an era where a designer presents a collection and everyone wears it,” she mentioned on the faculty, whose basement archive is filled with helpful clothes that college students and lecturers can research.
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This is due to the explosion in various kinds of clothes, “not a decline in talent”, careworn Aihara, including that it was now additionally important to review enterprise to start out a aggressive model.
Designer Mariko Nakayama, who labored as a stylist in Tokyo’s fashion scene for many years, additionally remembers “feeling goosebumps” carrying Comme des Garcons for the primary time.
She agrees, nonetheless, that the trade is totally different now.
“Looking at Virgil Abloh for Louis Vuitton, for example, I feel that now is an era of edit,” with designers making trendy tweaks to basic shapes and patterns, she mentioned at her boutique in Tokyo’s upscale Omotesando district.
‘Create new values’ in Fashion
Working in Paris, London, New York or Milan continues to be seen as key to succeeding for Japanese designers, mentioned Aya Takeshima, 35, who studied at Central Saint Martins within the British capital.
Takeshima’s latest present at Tokyo Fashion Week for her model Ayame featured ladies carrying sheer blouses and embossed clothes, whereas male fashions donned delicate clothes.
She instructed AFP she had chosen to review overseas to “learn what I needed to become an independent designer”, including that the expertise had helped her perceive totally different views.
“Honestly, I think it would be difficult” to succeed internationally whereas solely working in Japan, she mentioned.
“In Japan, it felt like technique was drilled into you first, while ideas and concepts… were secondary”, but it surely was the opposite approach round in London, Takeshima defined.
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Bunka school recognises these advantages and plans to supply a scholarship for finding out overseas as a part of its A hundredth-anniversary celebrations subsequent yr.
For 21-year-old Natalia Sato, a pupil at Bunka, Miyake and the outdated guard of Japanese designers “brought a great deal of Japanese and Eastern values” to the world, together with methods impressed by “delicate” conventional craftsmanship.
“I’m worried that the foundation they built might be destroyed by their passing”, however “at the same time, this is a turning point” that would present new artistic alternatives, she mentioned.
“It’s a chance for me to think about how we can create new values.”
© Agence France-Presse
