designer. Ryunosuke Okazaki
YOKE
The week begins with a knot. Not a bow and not a buckle, but a knot, tied at the waist of a sand-coloured trench coat with the quiet deliberation of someone who has thought about this one gesture for a very long time. Beside it, a crocheted bag in thick black yarn, its weave dense enough to feel weighted in the hand. These are the details that YOKE builds a collection around: the point where fabric meets decision.
Backstage at Shibuya Hikarie on a Sunday evening, the team works through a final round of adjustments. Scarves are folded, refolded, then wrapped around waists like obi sashes until the proportions resolve. YOKE presented menswear in Paris just two months earlier, and this homecoming show carries a specific tension. The audience here knows the brand best and will judge it accordingly.
designer. YOKE
The collection this season drew on Jean Arp’s biomorphic sculptures: organic, rounded forms that suggest the body without following it. You see it in the way a chocolate suede blazer falls past the hip with no structure to stop it, how a sage knit pools at the collar rather than sitting flat. There is a 1970s warmth to the suede, camel, taupe and olive palette, but the proportions belong to no decade. Sunglasses hooked into a collar – a leather belt as the only defined line on the body. The clothes look like they’ve always existed.
And then, one interruption: a cobalt blue blazer, oversized, cinched, worn with a downward gaze that makes the saturated colour feel like a private thought rather than a statement. In a collection built on muted earth tones, this single punch of blue does the work a finale would do elsewhere. It stays with you after everything else has settled into its quiet palette.
designer. YOKE
From behind, the collection’s architecture reveals itself. A cream coat falls in a single unbroken line from the shoulders to below the knee, wide enough to create its own silhouette, the body underneath barely a suggestion. This is where Arp lives in the collection: in the space the garment creates around the figure, the volume that belongs to the cloth rather than the person wearing it.
The show opened Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo on a note of restraint so precise it felt like a manifesto. While the week ahead would bring wire sculptures, theatrical staging and experimental debuts, YOKE began with a belt knotted just so, a coat that could have been carved from a single piece of stone and two pairs of kitten heels pointing toward the runway: one cream, one black, both perfectly still.
designer. YOKE
TANAKA
On a wall inside the Grand Prince Hotel Takanawa, the show exists as a grid of photographs. Nine numbered cards, each bearing a hand-written name in black marker – MAMADOU, STAS, CYANNE, MEISHA, COREMIN – pinned to damask wallpaper that predates every garment in the building by a century. Yellow Post-it notes mark adjustments. Some cards have shifted. This is how a collection looks before it becomes a show: provisional, practical, held together by tape and intention.
Backstage at TANAKA feels less like a dressing room and more like a workshop that has temporarily been installed inside a palace. A hairstylist adjusts a model’s hair with the focused economy of someone who has done this a hundred times, tool belt strapped across the chest, brushes and clips arranged by muscle memory. The model wears a sleeveless denim dress scattered with black crystal flowers: workwear and ornament sharing the same surface, which is the central tension of everything creative director Kuboshita makes.
designer. TANAKA
Between fittings, two models share a laugh, one in washed denim, the other in black with a purple turtleneck underneath.It is the kind of moment that only survives in photographs when the photographer has become part of the furniture. The collection this season is called “Blue Print,” named for the cyanotype process – sunlight, chemistry, time – and there is something of that slow exposure in the backstage atmosphere: unhurried, hands-on, attentive to the way materials respond to touch.
The technique is most visible on a white turtleneck where botanical silhouettes such as leaves, stems and seed heads appear in deep indigo, their edges bleeding outward like sun-bleached shadows. It is as much photography as textile: the fabric as a photosensitive surface, the print as evidence of light. Below, black leather trousers and a belt with a buckle that looks like it was chipped from a rock face. TANAKA has always thought in terms of time: denim aged to simulate decades, leather creased to mimic wear. The cyanotype extends that philosophy into a different medium.
designer. TANAKA
The denim itself ranges from pristine raw indigo – so dark it reads as midnight, the tan topstitching pulling every seam into sharp relief – to surfaces that no longer resemble fabric at all. A sleeveless vest in mottled grey, black and cream looks excavated rather than sewn, its surface as geological as the belt buckles that accompany it. Crystal flowers are scattered across the terrain: small, precise, placed with the deliberate asymmetry of lichen on stone.
Up close, the embellishments tell their own story. A black leather jacket studded with faceted black and clear stones arranged in flower clusters, some tight and symmetrical, others loose and drifting toward the collar or across the yoke. From the front, a model with styling clips still in his hair gives a half-smile; from behind, the crystal constellations map the shoulders like a night sky rendered in hardware. These are not decorations applied to finished garments. They are part of the material argument: a century of denim and leather history, with flowers growing through the cracks.
The last image is a hand raised to the face. Behind it, a patchwork coat assembled from panels of black leather, tan leather, cream shearling and dark curly shearling. Each texture has a different weight, a different warmth, a different age.Beneath the coat, a black jacket with floral embroidery. The gesture might be a shield, or a salute, or simply a model adjusting to the light. Either way, it leaves the chapter the way TANAKA leaves most questions about its garments: open, material and asking to be touched.
designer. TANAKA
VIVIANO
Thursday evening, Yodobashi Church. VIVIANO’s backstage was the most visually charged space of the week, a place where emotion was being constructed, layer by layer, before a single model touched the runway. The collection, titled “Portrait of Her, Unnamed,” portrayed women who continue to exist and believe in their potential even amidst uncertainty, and the makeup was where that conviction was first made visible. Dark cherry lipstick was applied with a fine brush, each stroke transforming the mouth into something sharper, more defined. The red blush swept wide from cheekbone to temple, not as colour but as heat: visible, physical, almost feverish.
The hair direction was built in stages. Backstage, sections were twisted into tight, rope-like formations and pinned close to the head: a preparation technique that, once released, would produce the wild, maximum-volume curls the collection demanded. In their intermediate state, the twists had their own sculptural beauty: raw, architectural, a blueprint for the chaos to come. One model sat patiently as a pink brush teased her already-released curls into a halo of volume, smiling at herself in the mirror… the only moment of lightness in a process that otherwise felt like armouring.
The church itself was inescapable. Wooden pews lined the backstage holding area, and models sat among them in white button-down shirts like parishioners waiting for a service that hadn’t yet revealed its nature. A coral felt hat rested in one model’s lap: a soft, almost childlike object against the solemnity of the setting. The contrast was deliberate. VIVIANO’s designer had chosen this venue because the runway would be so narrow that models could barely pass each other without pulling their shoulders back. Backstage, that compression was already palpable, bodies and garments occupying every available inch, the air warm with concentration.
designer. VIVIANO
Against a red velvet curtain – the kind you’d find in a confessional – two models stood in profile: one in a grey sweatshirt tucked into a dark tulle skirt, leather gloves clasped behind her back; the other in a cream floral blouse with a high neck. Both wore dark lips and twisted hair. The juxtaposition was quiet but pointed. The everyday and the romantic, side by side, both dressed for something they couldn’t yet name.
The textures told their own story. A golden feathered coat, spiky and dense, blurred the boundary between garment and living thing: seen up close, the fibres caught the light like wheat in a field, and through them a model’s hand reached up to push through her teased hair, dark cherry lip just visible. On the floor nearby, a pair of black Victorian-style button boots with curved heels sat empty and waiting, the kind of shoe that belongs to a woman from another century, or one who has decided to become her.
designer. VIVIANO
Then the lights shifted, the music dropped and the models stepped from the warm wood of the backstage into the church’s blood-red glow. A pink satin gown, voluminous, sculptural, luminous, moved through near-darkness, the fabric catching the only light in the room. It was the kind of image that made the hours of preparation suddenly legible: every brushstroke, every twisted strand of hair, every carefully buttoned boot had been building toward this single passage through red light.
Between walks, the armour came off. Two models in delicate florals – one in a peach print with a black oversized cap, the other in white quilted fabric with tiny blossoms – huddled together over their phones, dark nail polish glinting, blonde curls spilling everywhere. It was the most ordinary moment of the evening, and somehow the most revealing.
designer. VIVIANO
YUEQI QI
The venue for YUEQI QI was Jiyu Gakuen Myonichi-kan, a building that felt more like a private school chapel than a fashion venue. Dark wooden pews. Green light filtering through tall windows. The faint presence of trees outside. Into this setting arrived a cast of models who looked as though they had stepped out of an alternate dimension where lingerie, school uniforms, skiwear and folklore had merged into a single wardrobe. Somehow, everyone was entirely at ease with the result.
This season drew inspiration from “ROSA,” an underground shopping arcade that once existed in Niigata: not its spectacle but its quiet presence and atmosphere. The collection expressed these qualities through intricate laser-cut lace, unique graphics and the brand’s signature “Love” motifs, all products of painstaking, time-consuming handiwork.
Backstage was the pews themselves. There was no separate area, no curtained-off space; the models simply sat in the chapel’s seating in their finished looks, waiting. This intimacy of models and garments in a living room rather than a production line defined the entire experience.
The craftsmanship revealed itself at arm’s length. A silver dress made entirely of laser-cut rose-shaped pieces cascaded down the body like liquid metal, each tiny element catching the light independently. Beside it, a white and silver version showed the “Love” lace and heart motifs more clearly: intricate cut-outs layered over sheer fabric, the skin visible beneath like a manuscript seen through tracing paper. Where the silver pieces met the floor, they pooled around chunky white sneakers in a collision of preciousness and streetwear that only YUEQI QI could make feel inevitable.
designer. YUEQI QI
The technique extended beyond metal and fabric. A yellow leather capelet, cropped and fastened with snap buttons, revealed the same laser-cut rose and honeycomb patterns punched through hide: the material stiffer, the shadows harder, the effect more punk than precious. Paired with a deep teal lip and a direct, unwavering gaze, it was a reminder that YUEQI QI’s “cute” label only tells half the story.
A black leather capelet with laser-cut detailing and silver buttons sat over a caramel and black lace corset, which was the collection’s darkest edge, worn with dark lips and an unflinching stare. Elsewhere, the palette shifted to pastels: a navy cardigan covered in yellow pixel-art rabbits was worn with a fur-trimmed skirt and floral-print tights, while one model sat on a pew eating a snack with a sideways smile, embodying the collection’s playfulness.
Elsewhere, a headpiece made entirely of linked white and silver cut-out pieces sat like a crown over dark hair – and tangled into it, completely naturally, were a pair of earbuds. The collision of painstaking handcraft and everyday life, visible only from behind and at close range, felt like the whole collection in a single image.
The face details were everywhere. Small flower-shaped gems in pink, mint, orange and yellow were placed on cheekbones and beside noses. The playful anime-style “tears” that read as humorous from the front row but, seen up close on the pews, revealed themselves as tiny acts of precision. The nails were worlds of their own: chrome stiletto extensions, each finished differently – some mirrored, some embedded with tiny pearls or crowns – framing faces already marked with lavender eyeshadow and jewelled tears. One model cupped her cheeks in both hands, every finger a small exhibition.
designer. YUEQI QI
Between the looks and the waiting, the models lived in the space as though it belonged to them. Two sat side by side, one in a pale blue corset dress with fuzzy blue gloves, the other in a floral bow-neck blouse, both in printed tights, both with face jewels, gazing at something off-camera with the particular patience of people who have been looked at all day. Three others huddled for a selfie, one arm outstretched, a sushi phone case catching the light, pixel-print fabrics overlapping in a tangle of colour.
A model in a sheer peach organza blouse with layered ruffles and lace sat, holding her phone, with extremely long nails curled around it, small orange gems on her cheeks and an olive-dark lip. Beside her, a friend in a fur-collared chain-print coat stared directly at the camera with the calm authority of someone who knows she won’t be asked to smile.
This was the paradox of YUEQI QI backstage. Everything was tiny: the gems, the lace cuts, the pixel graphics, the delicate beadwork of the clips. But the cumulative effect was overwhelming. Sitting in those wooden pews surrounded by laser-cut silver and lavender lips and rabbit cardigans and anime tears, the world outside the windows felt very far away. The designer had built a universe, and it fit inside a chapel.
designer. YUEQI QI
kotohayokozawa
The show hasn’t started yet, but the set is already telling you everything. White traffic cones stand in rows like sentinels. Electric scooters lean against a metal barrier. Tropical plants – palms, monstera – rise out of the darkness under a wash of teal-green light. This is Nishi-Shinjuku reimagined as a stage set, the everyday infrastructure of a Tokyo neighbourhood brought indoors and made strange. kotohayokozawa has always been interested in the street as raw material, and this season the designer made the metaphor literal.
Backstage, the collection’s print language comes into focus. These aren’t patterns, they’re photographs, fragmented and reassembled across panels of corduroy and jersey. Cityscapes, park benches, figures caught mid-gesture, all cut apart and collaged onto the body as if someone had taken scissors to a stack of snapshots and sewn the pieces back together without checking whether they matched. A beanie in the same fractured imagery. Stacked bangles in blue and green at the wrist. The effect is of wearing a place rather than depicting it.
designer. kotohayokozawa
The pleating, though, is where the craft lives. Up close, the colour-blocked panels of green, navy, pink and mint overlap in organic curves with raw lettuce-edge seams that ripple like water. The ribbed texture makes every colour shift shimmer. There is a clear lineage here from Issey Miyake’s pleated work, but kotohayokozawa pushes it into something more graphic, more collaged, more restless. Two models standing together show the range: one in abstract colour-blocks, the other in a photographic-print top with a brown velvet bow tied at the neck as if she’d wandered in from a different century.
Then the texture changes entirely. An oversized shaggy knit in white, flecked with green, catches the backstage light like frost on a branch. A magenta ribbed collar peeks through at the neck, the only sharp colour in an image that otherwise dissolves into softness and shadow. It is the quietest moment in a collection that rarely sits still.
designer. kotohayokozawa
A model in a gradient-dyed pleated top, the colours shifting from lavender through pink, blue and orange like a thermal scan, turns and smiles. It is the only smile in these ten images, and it changes everything. After the moody backstage lighting and the serious gazes, this single expression of warmth reminds you that kotohayokozawa’s world, for all its visual density, is built on joy. The clothes are meant to be fun. The pleating is extraordinary, but so is the feeling of wearing colour that moves with you.
The details confirm it. Cobalt blue patent flats worn over lavender socks layered over green socks: a colour stack that reads like a Matisse cutout at ankle level. On the floor beside them, a hand-written label in red marker: FINALE. Nearby, a model clips two miniature handheld gaming devices to the waistband of washed denim jeans, just above the rivets. These are not accessories in any conventional sense. They are souvenirs from a childhood spent in the arcades and electronics shops of Nishi-Shinjuku, carried forward into the present as wearable memory.
The last image before the runway belongs to the green light. A shaggy cream cardigan worn open over a tie-dye bikini top and fuchsia leggings, caught in the teal wash that bathes the entire venue. It is the most maximalist combination in the chapter, with fur and swimwear and hot pink, and it feels exactly right. kotohayokozawa does not edit for coherence. The designer edits for energy, and backstage on a Friday evening in Tokyo, the energy was unmistakable.
designer. kotohayokozawa
Ryunosuke Okazaki
The atelier is quiet in the way that workrooms are quiet when the work has already left. Dress forms stand in a loose cluster like an audience waiting to be dismissed. Behind them, a pegboard of thread spools in every colour Okazaki might ever need, and a Juki machine, its needle raised mid-sentence. The garments are already elsewhere, on bodies, being transformed into something the workshop can only approximate.
Backstage, the transformation is still in progress. A makeup artist draws a cotton bud beneath a model’s eye, correcting a line of pink shimmer with surgical patience. The model wears a dark floral velvet top – roses in dusky pinks and blues – that feels almost Victorian in its softness. Nothing about this moment prepares you for what comes next.
A stylist sprays a model’s hair while the model holds a mass of grey wire loops against his body like an unwieldy bouquet. The structure is not yet worn; it hangs from his hands, inert, waiting. This is the moment before a Ryunosuke Okazaki garment becomes itself: when the wire and velvet are still just materials, not yet architecture.
designer. Ryunosuke Okazaki
The collection this season is anchored by the word “emotions”. It’s a shift from the more ethereal, spirit-like forms of earlier work toward something grounded in feeling. You see it first in the quieter pieces: an olive knit top with wire-supported shoulders that extend the body’s silhouette just past the point of normality, a hammered metal crescent tucked into the side opening like hidden armour, an asymmetric teal skirt, pink socks. It could almost be worn on the street. Almost.
Then the volume escalates. A single wire hoop expands into an oval shell of electric blue velvet that envelops the entire torso, the body visible only through gaps where the fabric falls away. A leopard-print headpiece extends in pointed wings, obscuring the face. From behind, the construction becomes legible as the clean edge of the internal frame, the velvet hanging from it in vertical folds like curtains in a theatre that hasn’t opened yet.
Okazaki’s recurring theme of “prayer”, rooted in his Hiroshima origins, has been present since the brand’s debut, but each season it takes a different form. This time it surfaces in the prints: python, floral, houndstooth, all rendered in velvet and stretched over wire. Through the glass partition backstage, golden python-print loops catch warm light at a model’s neck and décolletage. It is the collection’s most intimate image: the velvet nap is almost tactile, the face soft behind the focal plane, the glass adding an aquarium stillness.
designer. Ryunosuke Okazaki
Not every piece here is a sculpture. A dark velvet dress with a pointed, thorn-like hem; a shearling brim extending horizontally like a second horizon; a faux-fur clutch held close to the body. These are garments that exist in the space between ceremony and instinct. And then movement dissolves them in a turn, a slow exposure, and the plum velvet bleeds into the white backdrop like ink dropped in water.
On the runway, the wire structures come fully alive. A python-print skirt shaped into jagged points radiates from the hips like a starburst, held in tension by a black pinstripe bodice above. And then the red cherry velvet strips are arcing, crossing and spiking in every direction over a floral catsuit, the most calligraphic piece in the collection, more drawing than garment. “I intended to make ready-to-wear,” Okazaki said afterwards, “but as I was making it, I realised this was also a form of expression.” That productive hesitation is the engine of the whole collection.
The silver piece is the collection’s centrepiece, with wire arcs radiating outward in sweeping loops, a headpiece of crimson and black wound through the hair, the body barely visible inside its own halo. But the final image is a face. Four frames, four barely perceptible shifts of expression, burgundy velvet gathered at the throat like a rose. After all the architecture, the emotion the collection promised is here: quiet, contained, and unmistakably human.
designer. Ryunosuke Okazaki
photography + words. Maria Biardzka
