Hitting the high Cs: Cool, cute and creative
By Suzy Menkes International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, MARCH 21, 2006
TOKYO With a rich and compelling street style that veers from dolls and maids to Goths and Ganguro tans, Japan's fashion has a global resonance with the young and hip. Its "kawaii" child-woman cuteness has been marketed globally as a "girlie" look, just as Manga cartoons have swept the world.
But can fashion in this city hit three high "Cs": cool, cute and creative?
That is the challenge for Japan Fashion Week, now in its second season, with government support aimed at helping a new designer generation and giving Tokyo the resonance of other fashion capitals.
"I was lucky to be here at a turning point of the industry," says Naoko Munakata, director of the fashion policy office at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. More than 50 shows, including three fashion college presentations, are on the Tokyo runways this week. So far, they have ranged from madcap animal headgear through sophisticated lacy knits to denim in its many guises.
At mintdesigns' show, the clothes were intriguing, with their music-note prints and strings to create changing volumes. Theatre Products showed men's knitwear on a wide cast of characters and lacy body suits as a basis for female models dressing on stage. Mode Acote's broderie-anglaise trimmings had a faint echo of Tokyo's new craze for "Maid cafes;" while mercibeaucoup caught Japanese culture in the cartoonish animal accessories and in the models sweeping up animal confetti, bowing to each other over their brooms.
Yet the show that fashion followers are talking about was not even part of fashion week: Tokyo Girls Collection drew 20,000 young women who paid to watch the fashion show and music stars - and then called in on their cellphones to buy clothes direct from catwalk to customer.
Japan's inventive technology informs many aspects of its fashion. A fabric display at the runway venue showed ultra- light synthetic fabrics, prints looking as though they were handcrafted and denim in myriad textures and weaves.
Jeans in Japan, a group of denim manufacturers, whose annual business is worth \400 billion, or about $3.45 billion, at retail, put their ideas on stage. The show from Edwin, Lee Jeans and Wrangler included frilly outfits decorated with beads and bling and artfully distressed denim.
Significantly, Jeans in Japan was not just about funky outfits for boy bands in Harajuku. There were also mature male models with well-pressed denims. And for good reason: The demographics of Japan mean that the youthful consumers will soon be joining an aging society.
Even Uniqlo, the fast fashion brand offering clothes at rock bottom prices, is planning to trade upwards next season with a line from a young designer duo.
"If we want to sell abroad, we must have clothing for adults," says Munakata. On Monday, Chinami Kamishima showed just those fresh adult looks: womanly skirts, flowing jodhpur pants, a tweed cape and streamlined jackets dressed up with Chantilly lace.
Munakata believes that with China taking over the fabric industry and copying clothes with cheap manufacture, there has to be a new initiative from Japan.
"And that is where technology can help," she says. "We need to expose Japanese fabrics to designers to create high end brands."
Why has it taken Tokyo's fashion industry so long to come up with a second wave of talent to follow the Japanese invasion of the West 25 years ago?
"It has been 20 years of sleeping time - while the street became the fashion trendsetter," said Okada Shigeki of the Council of Fashion Designers, Tokyo.
And Japanese designers are not prophets in their own country, claims Yoko Ohara, president of IFI (Institute for the Fashion Industries) business school.
"Designers don't get appreciation unless they are famous somewhere else first," says Ohara, who considers creative imagination a parallel learning curve to the management and financial strategies she teaches.
"We have to get confidence in ourselves," she says. "If designers confine themselves to the old world of 'mode,' the ideas depend on either history or the Western world. But if they open their eyes to what is on the street and the kawaii culture, they have to learn how to become designers - to have broad base of intellectual understanding of history and culture - then they have to swallow it and digest."
It is not simple to absorb current influences, according to Naoki Takizawa, who shows in Paris as a designer for Issey Miyake. Takizawa is convinced that Manga is the country's most powerful cultural source, but he does not think it easy to embrace.
"It is very complicated. Manga has always been something hidden," he says, referring to parental and societal disapproval.
Takizawa has used Manga-inspired images on the inside, following a traditional Japanese aesthetic, as seen in kimono linings. He has also worked with Takashi Murakami, whose unsettling flat-plane art pops up in many prints. Eriko Minamitani, a writer specializing in popular culture, even suggests that the flatness is symbolic in a city where fashion has no meaning or context - just pleasure and kawaii. Katsui Hokuto, trained at London's Central Saint Martin's school and one of the mintdesigns duo, proved the point when he said of the music patterns: "They have no meaning; they are just visual images."
So far, no designer has come up with a stand-out show. But with four more days to go for both fashion week and cherry-blossom time, Japan's designers, like the flower buds, have the time to burst into bloom.
I'll be back later with a few more)
Good god, how can they call this a fashion week - it´s certainly a very long time they are stretching the show schedule - can you tell me how many people in total are actually on schedule, Melisande?
