designer. Alain Paul
Seven designers who completed the picture of Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo AW26: from heritage reinventions to double-award debuts.
A week of fashion doesn’t reveal itself all at once. “Signals from Tokyo” caught the collective mood of Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo AW26; “Behind the Curtain” went backstage. But some shows need their own space — collections too singular to fold into a trend, designers whose stories only sharpen when told at length. This final piece gives that space to seven of them: from a heritage house reopening with live jazz to an entirely handmade garden built for the myth of Orpheus, from a Paris-trained newcomer looping an infinity runway to a 26-year-old closing the week with Marie Antoinette reimagined in black lace. They don’t define the season so much as complete it.
designer. mukcyen
mukcyen: Closing Night
Before a single garment appeared, there was the curtain. Translucent white panels hung floor-to-ceiling at Shibuya Hikarie, backlit by a low row of floor spots, and behind them, barely visible, a figure waited. For a few suspended seconds, the mukcyen show existed only as a silhouette and a promise. It was the final night of Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo AW26, and the week’s most decorated newcomer was about to close out the week.
mukcyen is the project of Yuka Kimura, a 26-year-old designer born in Tokyo, raised in Fujian, China, and trained at Bunka Fashion College before spending four years at Yohji Yamamoto. The brand name itself is a phonetic reworking of her surname in Mandarin — mù cūn — and since its launch in 2023, it has moved with extraordinary speed: a debut AW24 collection, a first runway for SS26, and now a second show that also happened to be the last of the entire week. Kimura arrived at Hikarie as the only designer in the season’s history to hold both the JFW Next Brand Award and the Tokyo Fashion Award simultaneously.
designer. mukcyen
The collection she showed was titled 在 (zai) — “formed” — and it marked a departure. Where previous seasons had drawn from speculative fiction and contemporary anxiety, this was mukcyen’s first collection inspired by a historical figure: Marie Antoinette. Not the caricature of excess, but the arc: a young woman whose identity was constructed, decorated, and ultimately destroyed by the roles imposed on her. Kafka’s Metamorphosis provided the philosophical frame: what remains of a person when society has finished shaping them?
The opening looks were steeped in Rococo references, such as gathered linen blouses with ruffled collars, lace layered over corsetry, vest-style tops recalling aristocratic underpinnings, but cut through Kimura’s signature body-conscious line. Eighteenth-century volume was there, but so was the body beneath it. Trousers reinterpreted the old-fashioned drawers with modern width and fall. Nothing historical was left as costume; everything was made wearable, present-tense.
designer. mukcyen
The collection’s most arresting image fused ceremony with mourning. A model stood backstage in a quilted white coat, face obscured by a lace veil, holding twin bouquets of black roses, one in each hand. It was bridal and funereal at once; the young queen and the condemned woman collapsed into a single frame. The black roses, which recurred throughout the collection as corsages and headpieces, functioned as the season’s central motif: beauty that has already turned.
Backstage, the process of “forming” was still underway. A makeup artist powdered a model’s cheek above a ruffled black lace collar; nearby, a raw-edged pinstripe suit, the collection’s sharpest tailoring, with frayed seams left deliberately unfinished, hung open on a bare chest. The deconstruction was quiet but legible: these garments looked like they were still becoming something, or had just stopped being something else.
designer. mukcyen
The hair told its own version of the story. One model wore a towering construction of looped, knotted copper curls piled impossibly high, a direct echo of the powdered rococo pouffes that Marie Antoinette made infamous, reimagined as sculptural mass rather than powdered ornament. It was excessive and beautiful and faintly absurd, which may have been the point.
As the collection progressed, the palette darkened. Black lace replaced white. A camisole dress with a voluminous ruffled scarf — crinkled, textured, absorbing light rather than reflecting it — marked the turn. The Rococo vocabulary remained, but the mood had shifted from innocence to something heavier: roles accepted, or imposed.
designer. mukcyen
Two models stood side by side in near-darkness. One in a burgundy-black coat pinned with a large black floral corsage, the other swallowed in crinkled black lace from shoulder to hem. This was the collection’s final register: society having completed its work. Kimura’s own words, quoted in the show notes, echoed here: “Deep down, I’ve never quite been satisfied with the roles society assigns to me.”
The last image belonged to the runway. The bridal figure from backstage — white coat, dark bouquets, obscured face — reappeared in motion, caught in a long exposure that dissolved her edges into light. She was still walking, but already disappearing. It was Kafka’s metamorphosis made visible: not the horror of transformation, but its quiet inevitability. The curtain closed on mukcyen, and on the week.
designer. ALAINPAUL
ALAINPAUL: Repertoire
ALAINPAUL arrived in Tokyo from Paris. The brand, launched in 2023 through a collaboration between RUN, the ANDAM Fashion Awards, and JFWO, had shown its “REPERTOIRE” collection at Paris Fashion Week just weeks earlier. For Shibuya Hikarie, designer Alain Paul reimagined that collection for a new audience and a new space: a darkened hall with the runway traced in the shape of an infinity symbol, models walking a looping path through seated rows on both sides.
The first look sets the vocabulary. A white pleated halter dress with gathered volume at the hips – panniers, essentially, the 18th-century silhouette that widens the body into architectural form — moved alongside a sharp chocolate-brown suit. The pairing was deliberate: fluidity beside structure, contemporary ballet beside Parisian tailoring. Alain Paul trained at Vetements and at Louis Vuitton under Virgil Abloh, and both legacies were audible in the tailored precision and the willingness to disrupt it.
designer. ALAINPAUL
The collection moved between registers with uncommon assurance: sheer corset bustiers with fringed hems over gathered satin skirts; a head-to-toe red ensemble in cable knit and layered jersey that stopped the room; androgynous half-zip knits belted over white shirting. Jun Miyake’s score underlined the ballet thread, and dancer Aoi Yamada opened the show, her movement down the runway setting a physical language that the clothes then continued.
What distinguished ALAINPAUL from the week’s other newcomers was confidence in register. A cherry-blossom-print ruched dress, wrapped in a cream fringed shawl and paired with white boots, could have tipped into sweetness, but the ruching held it taut, and the shawl’s trailing tie-cuffs kept it sculptural. It was one of several moments where the collection reached for something tender without losing its edge.
designer. ALAINPAUL
The finale confirmed the range. Standing in a single line under side-lighting, the cast made visible a designer showing in Tokyo not as a debut but as a homecoming, bringing a Paris-validated collection back to the city where JFWO and ANDAM first supported it. The infinity runway may have been symbolic, but the loop it described — Paris to Tokyo and back — was real.
designer. yushokobayashi
yushokobayashi: The Garden of Orpheus
Of all the shows at Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo AW26, yushokobayashi’s was the hardest to describe as a fashion show. Titled after the Orpheus myth, the collection was staged as a theatrical performance inside a handmade garden — bamboo poles wrapped in tape, silk flowers planted in a green checkerboard floor, white linens strung overhead like washing lines, a draped table at the centre that functioned as both altar and stage. At the climax, under deep blue light, a figure bent over a body lying among scattered petals. This was the “Death Ribbon”: the designer’s term for the moment where loss becomes material. It was closer to butoh than to a runway.
designer. yushokobayashi
A live singer accompanied the procession, and the models did not walk so much as emerge from behind the linens, between the bamboo, through the flowers, wearing garments that looked as though they had been assembled from a garden’s memory. Everything was handmade. Yusho Kobayashi produces every piece himself, and the textures confirmed it: crinkled paper-like fabrics that held the creases of human handling, hand-painted floral washes in pink and turquoise that bled into one another, and crochet lace panels that trailed loose threads like roots.
The collection’s most arresting garments were the paper dresses: stiffened, crumpled, hand-painted with flowers in pink and yellow, finished with enormous bows and lace hems. They looked like love letters written on fabric, or children’s drawings given three-dimensional form. One skirt carried actual sketched figures in pencil and crayon as though a diary had been cut into a pattern piece and worn. A hooded shawl made of knitted patchwork strips in pink, grey, and cream, draped over it, trailing crochet and loose threads, the act of making left deliberately visible.
designer. yushokobayashi
Two versions of the paper bow dress appeared in sequence: one white with pink washes, the other blush with bolder blooms in purple and gold. Together they read less as fashion looks than as artefacts from another discipline entirely, like painting, collage or puppetry. In a week that celebrated craftsmanship across every register, yushokobayashi occupied a category of one: not handmade as luxury, but handmade as necessity, as though no machine could hold what these garments were trying to say.
designer. ENFÖLD
ENFÖLD: Living Sculpture
ENFÖLD showed outdoors, at dusk, on the tarmac drive of the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, an Art Deco building from the 1930s that served as a quiet assertion of context. The audience wore headphones, receiving the soundtrack through a silent disco system that turned the show into a private, immersive experience while the building’s neighbours heard nothing. It was the week’s most architecturally considered presentation, and the collection matched it.
designer. ENFÖLD
Titled “Living Sculpture,” the AW26 collection drew on Brancusi, Noguchi, and the Dutch artist Mark Manders, and it showed. A mint satin dress ballooned from a deep V-neckline into a single ovoid volume, a Noguchi lantern made wearable. Elsewhere, bouclé surfaces evoked rock or mineral deposits, and colour-blocked panels in camel and mint recalled the planar compositions of mid-century sculpture.
The most striking departure was a gold folded top: origami-like, architectural, its panels jutting from the body at sharp angles. It was worn over nothing but satin shorts and long grey knit gloves. It was a piece that existed as an object first and a garment second, which was precisely the point.
designer. ENFÖLD
Not everything reached for spectacle. A charcoal tweed A-line dress, floor-length with a square neckline and long sleeves, was almost monastic in its restraint: the kind of garment that proves a designer’s spatial intelligence through subtraction rather than addition. The textile headpieces, recurring throughout the collection, reinforced the sculptural programme: clothing as something that extends above the head, below the knee, past the fingertips.
But the collection’s real strength was the range between extremes. Between the sculptural set pieces came deeply wearable propositions, like knit sweaters whose sleeves extended seamlessly into gloves, skirts with organic Noguchi-like cut-outs at the front, oversized herringbone coats in unexpected colour pairings of plum with red-orange, mint with mustard. ENFÖLD made the case that spatial ambition and everyday clothing can occupy the same runway.
Three other designers completed the week’s picture:
designer. ZUCCa
ZUCCa
ZUCCa’s first runway show on the official Rakuten FWT schedule felt less like a debut than a quiet declaration of intent. Now in his second season since taking over as designer, Kengo Baba chose the brand’s own freshly renovated Minami-Aoyama store as the setting, a concrete-and-wood interior where large windows let in natural light and the boundary between indoors and outdoors dissolved into greenery. A drum set, a trumpet, and a double bass were arranged at the end of the room, and the show opened not with a model but with live jazz.
The first looks came in the brand’s signature blue: deep navy, gathered and fluid, with a quietness that matched the music. This was clothing that trusted its own fabric. That trust is the foundation of “ZUCCa metier,” the newly launched line at the collection’s centre, which places an unusual emphasis on textile quality, with materials developed in collaboration with Japanese manufacturers and specified down to the yarn itself. Fabrics combined warmth and sheerness in ways that defied easy categorisation, while others appeared to shift between blue and red depending on the angle: a quiet technical achievement that only revealed itself in motion, under natural light.
The palette moved outward from blue in careful increments. Purple arrived as full monochrome sets, then rose-pink glen checks, then a single red wool overshirt whose restraint made the moment land. What Baba is building at ZUCCa is not revolution but recalibration, a heritage name redirected toward material quality, trans-seasonal thinking, and the kind of layered, genderless dressing that assumes its wearer has a life to move through rather than a look to perform. The jazz played on through the finale, and the applause that followed felt genuinely earned.
designer. TAE ASHIDA
TAE ASHIDA
Where younger designers on the schedule often communicate through abstraction, TAE ASHIDA chose a word and meant it. The collection’s theme was “LOVE,” framed not as sentimentality but as a response to what the house described as chaotic global circumstances: love as the fundamental force that sustains and propels us forward. At the Grand Hyatt, one of the most glamorous venues of the week, adorned with flowers and attended by figures including Ahn Mika and Norika Fujiwara, vocalist Emi Evans filled the room with an original composition written specifically for the show, setting an emotional register most Tokyo shows don’t attempt.
The opening looks establish the house’s core authority: a floor-length black coat with a white contrast collar framing a houndstooth dress beneath, an ivory asymmetric blazer suit with satin lapels catching the light. Heritage fabrics — plaid, houndstooth, bouclé — were treated not as nostalgia but as living material. A plaid balloon-sleeve dress with a handkerchief hem caught the air with each step. The final passage was where “LOVE” became most visible: sequin-panelled cardigans with velvet-ribboned culottes, feathered capelets over palazzo trousers, and a closing blush tulle bolero over lace that was as close to a declaration as fashion gets. If the tailoring said trust, the final looks said tenderness, and TAE ASHIDA meant both.
designer. COTE MER
COTE MER
COTE MER returned to Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo for the first time since 2018, and it did so on a runway carpeted in graduating shades of red, backed by darkness. The brand specialises in one-of-a-kind garments crafted from vintage materials, and this season those materials were kimonos and obi sashes. The question the collection posed was deceptively simple: what happens when centuries of Japanese textile craft are cut into the silhouettes of Western streetwear?
The answer arrived as a biker jacket pieced together from kimono silk — chrysanthemums, fans, cranes, gold leaf — walking out on a body that might just as easily have been heading to Shibuya as to a ceremonial tea house. The collection operated in two registers: the opulent (richly dyed kimono silks cut into bombers and blazers, with gleaming Nishijin-ori obi panels finished with gold studs) and the textural (indigo boro patchwork hybridised with black leather, visible sashiko running stitch recording hands and time). Between them ran a denim stream, like washed trucker jackets patched with gold obi fragments, the contrast between faded cotton and luminous silk almost absurd and entirely convincing.
“Ninety percent of the customers who visit our Jingumae store are foreign tourists,” designer Sato noted. That audience was visible in the collection’s refusal to treat its source material as precious. These fabrics, some decades old, were cut, studded, zipped, and worn with boots. The two designers took their bow wearing their own pieces, as if to say the clothes were meant to be lived in, not preserved behind glass.
designer. mukcyen
From KAKAN’s opening-night hand-knitting to mukcyen’s closing-night double award, Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo AW26 revealed a scene in motion. The seven designers profiled here, working at scales from one-person ateliers to heritage houses, showing in Art Deco museums and jazz-soundtracked storefronts and candlelit churches, shared no single aesthetic. What they shared was a turning point. Each was arriving, returning, or transforming, and each chose Tokyo as the place to do it. In a global fashion calendar increasingly dominated by musical chairs at the top, the most compelling stories this season were being written further down the programme by designers with something to prove, and the craft to prove it.
photography. Maria Biardzka (mukcyen, ALAINPAUL, yushokobayashi + ENFÖLD) + Japan Fashion Week Organization (ZUCCa, TAE ASHIDA + COTE MER)
words. Maria Biardzka
