Tokyo style is a mixture. We have punk, luxury, high fashion, American traditional vintage and denim, and then Uniqlo and Muji — everything is mixed together here. It’s the same thing as our food — like how we mix pasta with natto [fermented soybeans]. It might sound weird, but it ends up being really good.
Even though Japan is usually known for its menswear, we’ve also seen a lot of interesting womenswear designers rising lately, such as Viviano, Fetico, Harunobu Murata, Chika Kisada and Akiko Aoki. The fashion week schedule includes more strong womenswear than ever.
Momo Angela, street style photographer at Vogue Runway
If you look back at Fruits and Harajuku style in the early 2000s, it had such a strong punchiness to it, because it was so uncommon and it was so new to people. But nowadays, it’s more subtle and simple. We don’t have anything that defines ‘Japanese style’ in the same way. Of course, a lot of people wear Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons, or Noir Kei Ninomiya, but then a lot of people are also wearing more casual sportswear and Adidas Sambas. I see a lot of girls wearing Grounds sneakers by Mikio Sakabe, too. I haven’t seen them that much in Europe, I feel like they’re a Tokyo thing.
Japan is also good at balance. Asian countries are starting to categorise their own body shapes [with something called the ‘skeletal type’] — wave shape, straight shape or natural shape, and considering this more with how they dress. It’s the same with colour, they’ll choose colours depending on their skin tone and whether they have a blue base or yellow base, for example. The difference in Japan is that people don’t try to copy what others are wearing, they get inspired and then convert it into their own style. It’s more personalised.
Yu Masui, fashion journalist and consultant
