Tokyo Fashion Week has a sprawl problem. A significant number of the city’s homegrown designers have taken to showing off-schedule, with more than 10 brands holding runway shows and presentations on seemingly random days throughout January and February.
For these designers, going off-schedule is a matter of getting in front of the money before it’s gone. Post-Paris, buyers’ budgets will have already been squeezed; to get an edge in the global market, Japanese brands need to make sure they aren’t last in line.
Fashion week in the Japanese capital now, as a result, feels amorphous. The change marks a significant challenge for the official Rakuten-sponsored Tokyo Fashion Week, which is set to take place from March 16-21 this season. Japan Fashion Week Organization (JFWO) first pushed the event back last year due to changes in the international fashion week schedule, the ramifications of which are now appearing.
There are 33 designers on the main schedule, compared to last year’s 37 (this is padded out by the annual Tokyo Fashion Award — the eight winners must show during the Autumn/Winter season as part of the prize). There are fewer big-draw names, however, breakout stars who have fled the main schedule include streetwise menswear brand Kamiya, knitwear label Pillings, and womenswear brand Fetico, diluting the impact of the main week. As a result, an identity crisis is brewing for Tokyo Fashion Week. How will it adapt if its main talents leave?
Increasingly competitive production schedules
Production scheduling challenges are the main reason brands are shifting their shows back and breaking away from the main fashion week, with brands competing for an ever-decreasing number of factories, which creates a production bottleneck. Due to Japan’s aging population and declining population, especially in rural areas, designers report that there are fewer and fewer factories to accept their orders each year. “Recently, good factories and fabric makers are limited, so the earlier they can do it, the better,” says Hirofumi Kurino, co-founder of United Arrows.
“If everything was in one week and all the designers showed together, of course, it would be more convenient for the journalists or buyers, but at the same time, the production problem is real,” he adds. “It’s best for them to show as fast as they can, otherwise all of the designers are rushing into the same factory in the same period.”
“I initially intended to hold the show during the main Tokyo collectsions as usual, but the production schedule made it difficult so I had to move it up,” says Ryota Murakami, the designer behind off-kilter knitwear brand Pillings, whose February runway show was an early highlight of the season. The brand has been steadily gathering momentum among press and buyers and was shortlisted for last year’s LVMH Prize.
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Sold only in Japan until recently, Pillings has been picked up by Dover Street Market London and, like many others, is currently planning to expand business abroad. “This season, we’ll be presenting in showrooms and starting overseas sales,” says Murakami. To account for shipping windows, international deliveries are often expected sooner than they are in Japan. “We needed to make sure they were ready earlier than usual or else the quality of the production would have declined and we would not be able to meet our deadlines.”
The scattershot schedule of shows, however, means that many brands will miss the international guests that attend during the main Tokyo Fashion Week.
Showing earlier, adds Kurino, means that buyers still have budgets. For many homegrown designers, domestic wholesale — both independent boutiques and department store concessions — still accounts for the majority of their sales. If they want to keep these accounts while also tempting doors abroad, showing earlier at home, and then going abroad to host showrooms, means they have the best chance of securing stockists while there’s still money to spend.
Next stop: Europe?
The designers presenting in February represent a growing chapter of Japanese talent that has outgrown the main Tokyo Fashion Week schedule — which positions itself as a springboard/incubator for emerging talent — but are not yet at the stage where they can confidently take on the European and American markets.
For many brands in this stage, a show in Paris is the next goal. The jump, in the context of the present weak yen and ever-increasing flight prices, however, is prohibitively costly and risky, with designers needing to shore up resources before they take the leap. “We don’t have enough funds yet to do a Paris show, so I’m focusing on increasing sales right now,” says Emi Funayama, whose label Fetico showed in February. Founded in 2020, the brand’s turnover is now in the low seven-figures. Feeling she has now hit her ceiling in Japan with almost 60 stockists across the country, the designer is looking to expand her global reach.
For others, bricks-and-mortar retail space is a key part of their strategy. Keisuke Yoshida, who is a longtime staple on the Tokyo schedule, also broke with tradition and held his presentation in February ahead of his first store opening this Spring. “For the past few seasons we’ve focused on increasing our wholesale accounts, and now we wanted a place where we can directly communicate with our fans,” he says. Currently the brand has 15 stockists across Japan, but no international doors. “I’d like to target overseas stockists over the next few seasons,” says Yoshida.
Womenswear designer Harunobu Murata, who opened his first store last year, showed earlier this season to move closer to the European fashion schedule. Now six years in business and with growth of about 50% year-on-year, the womenswear designer and Jil Sander alum is weighing up his options for holding a runway show in either Milan or Paris in the next year or so to stoke international sales. “In terms of the timing, we need to get ready for that,” he says.
Where does it leave Tokyo Fashion Week?
Many designers I spoke to for this story questioned the worth of showing during the official schedule. As well as the participation fee of ¥225,000 (about $1,500), designers worried that aligning themselves with a diluted schedule is no longer sensible from a branding perspective. “There’s a feeling that people are starting to lose a bit of respect for Japan Fashion Week,” says womenswear designer Akiko Aoki, who also held her showroom in mid-February.
Anticipating friction, JFWO released a statement at the end of January saying that it would take a macro position to support off-schedule brands. “We have a philosophy of serving as a platform to support Japanese designers from a long-term perspective, unconstrained by official periods, thereby invigorating Japan’s entire fashion and textile industry,” it read.
In practice, this means communicating off-schedule shows to press and buyers through JFWO’s mailing list, and by live-streaming the shows on their Instagram page. It’s a short-term solution to a long-term problem. “This initiative was developed through deliberation within JFWO, but remains temporary,” the statement qualified. “We plan to review and improve it as circumstances evolve.”
The shift has left Kaoru Imajo, JFWO’s director, with plenty to think about. “It’s been difficult,” he says. One option is to bring the event forwards to before NYFW, he adds, but there are other fashion cities to consider. “It’s hard to move Tokyo Fashion Week earlier because it collides with the Western fashion weeks like Copenhagen, New York and Berlin,” says Imajo.
Competing with other fashion weeks means less media attention and less international attendees for Tokyo Fashion Week — the latter has historically been an issue for the event due to budget restraints. “There’s still an opportunity to invite more international buyers,” says Kurino. “When they come here, they’re always surprised that the average of the production quality and the design originality is so high.”
Tokyo’s strongest designers, meanwhile, aren’t in a hurry to return to the schedule. “Buyers place their orders after a show, so I want to keep my Japan showroom and runway show schedules close together,” says Aoki. “If I do a show next season, it’ll probably be off-schedule.”
