What are Japanese designers thinking about?

basicks japan fw25 — Basicks FW25│© Tomoharu Kotsuji

All eyes should be on Tokyo when it comes to Fashion Weeks. Perhaps there’s an oversaturation in every realm, fashion not being the exception, but looking outside the borders of what floods our social media and exploring and diving deep into the industry of other countries can give us that breath of fresh air, that hope for the future and that spark in our eyes back that assures us that there's still something new, interesting and of high quality to look up to. Here are our picks of the most interesting narratives and our favourite collections of the last season of Rakuten Fashion Week.

KEISUKEYOSHIDA - Game and life

As the years go by, the 90s kids are slowly realising how it feels to enter adult life with the same mindset we had when we were kids. We must dress for business, but we would rather be anywhere else but the office, doing anything else but work. Keisuke Yoshida took our adult selves back to one of the places where he and many of us used to escape from the reality of being kids into more fantastical worlds: those buildings that house movie theatres, game centres and bowling alleys, specifically the Ikebukuro Rosa one, the one he went to the most. In there, surrounded by the arcade machines and the neon lights, the models came out one after the other with attire that looks out of place with the scenery but that perfectly represents the duality that represents growing up.

With a slickness that assured the kids grew up with excellent taste, the looks are sharp and elegant, but in the details, they maintain the sparks of creativity and fun we've been dragging from our younger days up until now. In some, the proportions are slightly altered, with the sleeves and the bodies being longer than they should be, a fit that we commonly associate with comfort or a sense of nostalgia from when certain clothes were too big for us. The prints and the embroidery are formal enough while still being creative; certain pops of bright colours like yellow or green bring life to the neutral tones and knots and deconstruction elevate classic shirts. Work attire or avatar skin?

PAYS DES FÉES - Tomie reincarnated

Few things we love just as much as fashion, and one of them is everything Junji Ito does. After multiple collaborations with different creators, Pays Des Fées, established in 2014 by designer Lim Asafuji has decided to unite their vision with the one of who is probably one of the most relevant names in the manga industry. Asafuji, an avid reader and follower of Ito’s pieces since her early childhood, found in Tomie — the girl with otherworldly beauty that hides the danger and horror her existence represents behind her hypnotic looks —the key visual and inspiration for Fission. The idea of the contrast between a pretty girl and grotesque motifs is perfectly encapsulated throughout the collection. With a concept so linked to a piece of media, the fine line between fashion and costume could be easily crossed, but here the balance was perfect.

Aside from the most obvious references, like the recreation of her already iconic hairstyle and eye makeup — mole included — in all the models or the representation of panels or illustrations from the manga, sometimes reinvented as prints, the inspiration was also found in the details and subtle decisions, like the choice of fabrics or the design of silhouettes. The garments are made with high-quality materials to keep the femme fatale style classic, and the colour palette remains romantic and seductive, just like Tomie's personality, only stained by the splatters of blood from her multiple victims, a reveal of her true self behind the mask. The master Junji Ito himself was at the show. “I was overwhelmed. It gave me the motivation to draw new works in the future,” he shared afterwards. Just that sentence is the confirmation that the collection was a success.

HOUGA - Casting spells

"Sprout your veiled gift. Unveil your own senses and feelings" is the motto of Houga, founded by Moe Ishida in 2018, and their new collection is an invitation to do exactly that. Ishida casts a spell on us through her creations with the collection Spell on my boundaries, using garments as a magical tool that allows us to reflect the deepest and most honest feelings that live inside us to help us become who we want to be. For this, she takes the pieces we wear every day, jackets, blouses, skirts and dresses, and reimagines them with a whimsical vision that can only be achieved by the use of high levels of technicality and expertise.

The deconstructions, the mixture of different fabrics and textures, and the proportions seem to be a strength for Houga, where despite the amount of material needed to create the ruffles, drapings and layers present in almost every look, they don't make the pieces look heavy on the wearer. The looks are complemented with an accessory that ties it all together, whether it's a headpiece, a scarf, the footwear or the bags. About these last ones, the designer describes them as small magic tools, with them being made with braided cords designed to ward off evil spirits.

BASICKS - Evolving the basics

If everything has been done before or not is an endless debate, but innovation is out of discussion; even the more basic pieces can be done in a different way, better and cooler. That’s what seems to be the concept of Basicks, one of the most prominent and successful brands present in Rakuten Fashion Week, designed by Masanori Morikawa, who’s also in charge of HUMMEL 00. After fifteen years in the business and focusing on “basic” designs and clothing and breathing new life into them by twisting, turning and deconstructing their structure, it seems they have found a formula for success, as evidenced in this collection where the codes and aesthetics that are now the hot topic in the new generation are presented in their unique way, differentiating them from the masses.

Divided into two parts, starting with a blast of colour and finishing on a dark note, each piece, whether the most simple or the elaborated ones, has a detail, a difference in construction or a subtle but significant change that makes them attractive. Some jeans are thought out to have the front part looking like the back; football and baseball jerseys are reimagined with the brand logos in unexpected silhouettes, and the shirts can be worn both in a conventional way or hanging by a thread around the neck. In the darker outfits, the contrast is created through layering, silhouettes and materials, making the all-black pieces look interesting and complex. With different collaborations with New Era, Reebok or Pendleton, Basicks is expanding its universe where the basics are more desirable than ever.

RIV NOBUHIKO - Just a girl

RIV NOBUHIKO’s first runway show after winning the Tokyo Fashion Award 2025 wasn’t just a debut — it was a quiet, powerful homage wrapped in layers of craft and emotion. Built on the warmth of couture and the strength of collaboration, designers Nobuhiko Kohama and River Garam Jang channelled deeply personal memories into their collection, titled LEE. Named after River’s mother, the collection explored the duality of womanhood — where strength doesn’t cancel out delicacy, and maturity often hides a lingering girlhood. This complexity was delicately stitched into each piece: the signature origami flower motifs now danced on ribbon-thin stems, light enough to sway but deliberate in their presence. The construction of the pieces is a highlight, and yes, we have florals for spring, but sometimes we need them more than anything.

Beauty here wasn’t just in the garments; it lived in the process too. A standout striped shirt pinched with hand-beaded embroidery became a canvas. Crafted by remote artisans in Japan and Korea—many of whom balance caregiving with their craft—these details reflect a quietly radical and communal approach to fashion. RIV NOBUHIKO provides not just a design but a system: guidebooks, training kits, and a flexible model that lets people create at their own pace. The show’s final look, a sheer dress with bag handles, reimagined elegance through utility, closing the loop between form and function. You wear beauty and time, but you also carry it, with all the weight and the implications it entails.

Harunobu Murata - A Swift elegance

There’s something quietly subversive in the way Harunobu Murata defines elegance — less spectacle, more sensation. For his latest show, the designer traded grandeur for intimacy, inviting guests into the underground gallery of Kudan House, where every glance, fabric shift, and breath became part of the atmosphere. Inspired by the trailblazing spirit of Dorothy Levitt, one of the first women to race cars in the early 1900s, the collection channels a quiet velocity, a sleek movement and a fluid volume. Her fearless attitude wasn’t just referenced — it was woven into the collection’s DNA through industrial textures and sharp silhouettes that suggested motion even while still. Even the textures, treated wool with a slight glaze that, when catching the light, looked like machine oil, carry the subtle but direct references to the world of the automotive.

Rather than clinging to the familiar, Murata pushed his audiovisual language forward — through the pieces of the collections and through the ambiance surrounding it, with the soundtrack breaking the usual softness with gritty electronics and percussive sounds. Keeping its intrinsic elegance and sobriety but giving it this industrial twist, everything remained cohesive, like a machine running smoothly. The result was a raw kind of grace, a good definition of what the Japanese designers and their understanding of fashion gift to the world; a collision of universes that manage to keep their essence while pushing the limits.

HATRA - Liminal Wear

Another winner of the Tokyo Fashion Award 2025 presenting its first collection on the runway, HATRA’s debut managed to carve out a moment suspended between reality and simulation. Held in the sleek space of Toda Hall, the show embraced both the physical and the virtual, inviting us into a world where garments flicker between dimensions. With the theme WALKER, designer Keisuke Nagami leaned into the instability of movement: materials that shifted with each step, prints so translucent they looked like whispers on skin. As the models walked, the clothing seemed to blink, disappear, and reappear; a living metaphor for the fractured yet fluid way we now engage with identity, technology, and self-expression.

Nagami’s ongoing dialogue with generative AI, not as a final piece but as a medium of creation, continues to shape the brand’s language, not as a gimmick but as a philosophy. For him, the creative process isn’t about answers but about questions that loop endlessly forward — fashion as an evolving system of interactions rather than fixed statements. The brand has been described as working with the concept of liminality, a notion very hard to find in a physical way, but through this dual perspective, where machine intuition and human instinct meet, the transitional feeling of the nothingness feels tangible. A brand where the idea of the future seems perfectly linked and fitted to our present, this being a debut runway collection, is a hopeful introduction of a conscious use of new technologies.

TAMME - The new punk

Japan’s implication, relationship and love for punk expressed through fashion have been widely talked about. We've done some articles about it, and some of the most notorious names to come out of the country fashion-wise have been inspired by the founders and precursors of this subculture, whether in music with the Sex Pistols or in garments with Vivienne Westwood. For such a rooted connection with what is not an aesthetic but a way of living, it is normal to assume the new generations will also be influenced by these codes and will learn to translate them in their own terms. What we see in Tatsuya Tamada’s Nocturnal Forward — also a winner of the Tokyo Fashion Award 2025 — as the last show of this season’s Rakuten Fashion Week is exactly this: the new punk.

Tamme’s one is a toned-down punk, not for this less impactful, but more sleek and sophisticated. The disruption is still there, whether in the slouchy but fitted silhouettes, the nonchalant styling where all the pieces look worn by chance but also millimetrically coordinated, or the deconstruction of the classical pieces, with a trench coat becoming an overskirt, military attire being given a new purpose or a tailored jacket being paired with some cargo denim pants. With the ever-present slim ties, the predominantly black and dark-coloured palette only interrupted by the whites and some toned-down dark reds, pinks and purples, it becomes evident how the nonconformist, rebellious and critical spirit of the past prevails in the present and how new generations still use fashion as a medium of powerful self-expression.