How Avant-Garde Japanese Designers Forever Changed the Way We Dress

WHILE WALKING AROUND Harajuku, the birthplace of Tokyo street style, this past September, I passed a man with a pink mohawk in a camouflage bomber jacket, holding hands with a woman dressed like a bag of candy. As they entered a convenience store, the couple stepped aside to let an older woman in a floral kimono go first. Earlier that year at Paris Fashion Week, on what some editors call Japan Day or Rei Day — when the Tokyo-based Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo and her acolytes Junya Watanabe and Kei Ninomiya all present their new collections — two guests had arrived at Ninomiya’s runway show unintentionally wearing the same outfit: a black polyurethane top with exposed suspenders, a trellised tulle dress and a plaited synthetic leather face mask. Resembling a pair of public executioners, they posed for pictures next to a woman with gray bunny ears.

As disparate as these looks were, each of them had a distinctly Japanese quality. Even in New York, where style isn’t nearly as expressive, many creative types landed long ago on a uniform that at least feels Japanese: a geometric or asymmetrical shirt; generously cut pants; and maybe some Maison Margiela Tabi shoes (which, despite having been created by the Belgian designer Martin Margiela in 1988, are based on a Japanese split-toe sock dating to the 15th century). But it wasn’t until my partner came home one day with a terry cloth “shirt” by the German designer Bernhard Willhelm — with more holes than humans have arms, it suggested the idea of a top more than it functioned as one — that I began to consider how Japanese avant-garde fashion has utterly changed the way we think about clothes, and why this version of the avant-garde developed where it did.

There’s no shortage of theories: Yoshiki Hayashi, 59, a Los Angeles-based musician and designer who goes by his first name professionally, suggests that Japanese fashion — an impossibly broad category, albeit with some foundational characteristics: loose, architectural and anti-sexy, at least in the Western sense — couldn’t exist in a nation that wasn’t so deeply conformist that to create something truly original requires something else to push against. Mikio Sakabe, 49, a designer who runs his own fashion school in Tokyo, tells me that the avant-garde is linked to the country’s postwar era, a period of suffering and humiliation. Japanese people don’t want to be elevated versions of themselves, he says; they want to be someone else altogether, which is why kawaii culture, or the embrace of cuteness and childlike innocence, and other forms of cosplay have proved so enduring there. Yet another designer, Ryuichi Shiroshita, 40, the Tokyo-based founder of Balmung who goes by the name Hachi, says that what the world might see as avant-garde is often an extension of Japanese traditions and customs — it’s not a stretch to link Issey Miyake’s famous pleats to the art of origami, while Kawakubo’s garments can be as dramatic as the costumes worn by performers of Noh, a 14th-century theatrical genre — and that many Japanese people don’t even consider the most outré looks to be all that unusual. Whereas in the United States, as one colleague quips, “You can have no style and wear a Comme des Garçons suit, or in other ways ‘dress Japanese’” — which could mean putting on an all-black outfit with chains and harnesses or a brightly colored one with a crystalline or sporelike silhouette, or anything with irregular proportions and frayed or torn edges — “and suddenly everyone thinks you have a personality.”

IN ENGLISH, THE word “kimono” means simply “the thing to wear,” and beginning in Japan’s Heian period (794-1185) and throughout the Edo period (1603-1868), during which the country shut off trade with most of the world, people of all classes wore this type of garment, originally known as a kosode. Yet court society was its own breeding ground for the avant-garde: Noblewomen and ladies-in-waiting favored the junihitoe, an elaborate mille-feuille of vibrantly hued silk kimono-like robes layered one on top of the other. In a culture that prioritized social harmony above all else (and still does), a person could experiment with wearing what they wanted — as long as they adhered to other rules of etiquette.

When the Meiji Restoration of 1868 brought feudalism to an end, Emperor Meiji started appearing in European-style suits with narrow sleeves and flashy epaulets, and during the U.S.-led occupation, which lasted from the end of World War II in 1945 until 1952, America introduced the country to modern Western fashion. As the Japanese economy began to recover, women were quick to abandon the monpe farming pants they’d worn during the war in favor of dresses, which largely replaced kimonos as everyday attire. Young men later discovered the Ivy look (chino pants, madras jackets). “Art Nouveau became Art Deco when it went [from Europe] to America after 20 or 30 years, but we didn’t have time to digest anything,” says Satoshi Kuwata, 41, whose brand’s name, Setchu, means “compromise.” By embracing the style of its occupier — jeans, T-shirts, oxford cloth button-downs — Japan cleverly created its own versions of such imports, just as it did with baseball and rock ’n’ roll. “The fashion cognoscenti started to proclaim that Japanese brands made better American-style clothing than Americans,” writes the Tokyo-based author W. David Marx in his 2015 book, “Ametora,” whose title is an abbreviated Japanese term for the country’s take on “American traditional.” Even today, says the Osaka-born designer Yoshio Kubo, 50, “we might have more American fashion than the United States.”

For decades, Japan made Western clothing its own. But then it reversed the trend, presenting the world with far more radically modern ideas about how to dress. Although some of the first-wave Japanese designers — like Junko Shimada, 83, who moved to Paris in 1966, or Michiko Koshino, 82, who relocated to London in 1973 — weren’t so avant-garde, there were hints of what was to come. Koshino, who became known for her inflatable PVC clothes, says, “Nice or bad, it didn’t matter. [I wanted to do] something different.” Others, like Kenzo Takada, who founded his Paris-based label, Kenzo, in 1970, or Kansai Yamamoto, who designed costumes for David Bowie’s 1970s Ziggy Stardust tour, were beloved but not exactly mainstream. The emergence of punk spurred new ways of thinking about creative protest and provocation and, by 1981, when Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, collaborators and companions at the time, arrived in Paris and joined Miyake, who’d already been showing there for eight years, something had happened: the rise of the Japanese avant-garde, an aesthetic proposition so profound and influential that it now seems inexorable.

Together, Kawakubo, Miyake and Yamamoto offered an austere intellectual alternative to the work of such European designers as Thierry Mugler and Gianni Versace, whose clothes largely concerned sex and power. Jun Takahashi, 55, a co-founder and the creative director of the brand Undercover, says, “Rei broke the ideology of Western elegance.” Miyake, who died in 2022 at 84, wrote in a 2009 Times essay that his innovative and optimistic approach to fashion — which included using dancers as models on the runway and experimenting with high-tech fibers or, as he once called it, “fabric that looks like poison” — was partly the result of having survived the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima. He said he preferred “to think of things that can be created, not destroyed.” Kawakubo and Yamamoto’s antifashion, as it became known, was viewed by some as a sincere attempt to make sense of the postwar era. “Black is an important color [for them],” says Kozaburo Akasaka, 40, founder of the Kozaburo workwear label. “My impression is that it’s about trauma or damage.”

It was also about liberation. Polly Mellen, a Vogue editor at the time, described the new Japanese look as “modern and free.” Other Western critics were confused, some responding with xenophobia. In her 2011 book, “Japanese Fashion Designers,” the Canadian historian Bonnie English writes that the press, shocked to see body-covering rags on the runway, referred to Kawakubo and Yamamoto as “Fashion’s Pearl Harbor.” Yamamoto, 81, recalls a different headline. “WWD [printed a picture of] a Comme des Garçons outfit next to one of my outfits. They wrote, ‘Sayonara!,’” he says. “At the very beginning, more than 90 percent of people hated my collections. And I liked that.”

These days, though, it’s impossible to find a designer who hasn’t been shaped in some way by Japan’s avant-garde; one can’t imagine the work of Marc Jacobs, Rick Owens or Simone Rocha without it. Even Hedi Slimane’s skinny jeans and Miuccia Prada’s sash-tied skirts are “a Japanese thing,” says Kuwata, the Setchu founder. The clothes freed other designers to think more expansively. “The Western idea of clothing is often about construction,” says Satoshi Kondo, 40, an employee of almost 20 years of the Issey Miyake brand and its artistic director since 2019. “The Japanese [prefer to] work with the human body, not to constrain it.”

The Japanese avant-garde also became an incubator for other incubators, particularly in Belgium, the other country that’s had the biggest influence on contemporary experimental fashion. In the mid-1980s, the Antwerp Six — a group of Belgian designers that included Ann Demeulemeester, Dries Van Noten, Walter Van Beirendonck and Dirk Bikkembergs, who once said, paraphrasing Yamamoto, that there’s “nothing so boring as a ‘nice and neat’ look” — built their own fashion community around Japan’s deconstructed aesthetic. (The admiration was mutual: Subsequent generations of Japanese designers would look to the Antwerp Six, especially Demeulemeester, for inspiration.) In 1989, less than a decade after Kawakubo and Yamamoto’s joint debut, which had become known as the Shock of Black, Margiela staged his first fashion show, in Paris. Like his Japanese predecessors, Margiela, who would later make mold-covered clothing and coats from wigs or broken crockery, challenged long-held ideas about materiality and good taste.

THE DAY AFTER Rei Day last fall, Rei Kawakubo was sitting alone at her desk in a cluttered, dimly lit office at the Comme des Garçons headquarters in Paris. One floor down, editors and buyers were inspecting some of the new sculptural pieces she’d presented in her spring 2025 women’s collection: a popcorn-like white tulle dress with bunches of splotchy red fabric, a lilac chenille garment in the shape of a human-size chess piece, a floral jacquard cone. At 82, a half century after opening her first store in Tokyo, Kawakubo, whose creations have included gingham tops and dresses with protuberant tumors (spring 1997), parchment paper gowns without armholes (fall 2017) and fragrances with notes of dust and burnt rubber, rarely talks to journalists, seldom makes public appearances and refuses to explain her collections much beyond naming them. She’d called this one Uncertain Future.

Kawakubo’s husband, Adrian Joffe, 71, the president of Comme des Garçons International and its many subsidiaries, including Dover Street Market, the couple’s multibrand retail chain, had organized a meeting to discuss this story. Although Kawakubo wasn’t unwelcoming, she kept her sunglasses on and spoke very little. She refused to be photographed, even in shadow. Almost an hour into the conversation, she decided not to be interviewed at all. Her peers could discuss her achievements; her absence, she insisted, would make her presence feel that much stronger. But out of respect for Kawakubo, Tao Kurihara, 51, and Watanabe, 63, whose labels are owned by Comme des Garçons — and who, like their mentor, create wildly imaginative, sometimes barely wearable garments that tend to obscure or distort the shape of the body — declined to comment too. Ninomiya, 41, whose brand, Noir Kei Ninomiya, also belongs to Kawakubo’s company, said she taught him “what clothes are.”

Avant-garde movements aren’t meant, by definition, to stick around forever, but this one has had remarkable staying power, perhaps because of the importance ascribed to apprenticeship in Japan. Sacai’s founder, Chitose Abe, 59, who started her career as a pattern cutter at Comme des Garçons, says she learned from her time there not only how to design clothes but how to build a business. Sulvam’s designer, Teppei Fujita, 40, who used to work for Yamamoto, says, “I learned everything from Yohji.” But when Fujita mentioned wanting to create his own label, Yamamoto replied, “Don’t do it. You’re not ready.” Fujita left anyway and, when he sent his teacher some pictures of his first collection, Yamamoto sent back a terse but loving reply: “Welcome to hell.”

In the decades since Kawakubo and her peers changed the industry, others have found new ways to reinvent and rebel. In 1993, Takahashi and Nigo made a different American export — hip-hop style — their own, opening a clothing store called Nowhere in a quiet part of the now-infamous Harajuku neighborhood. Takahashi presented his designs on one side of the shop; Nigo, who would go on to create A Bathing Ape and, much later, become the artistic director of Kenzo, sold imported apparel on the other. The merchandise was simple (logo T-shirts, sneakers, camouflage jackets), and for years there were lines down the block. Takahashi, whose work has since moved far beyond sweatshirts and graphic tees — his spring 2024 collection included illuminated clear PVC dresses filled with live butterflies — says, “Before the ’90s, Japanese design was purer and calmer. It had modesty. From the ’90s on, everyone started sampling.”

Yet today’s Tokyo creations usually come across as vital, even soulful, rather than gimmicky. Tomo Koizumi, 37, makes organza gowns that resemble ebullient loofahs; Anrealage’s Kunihiko Morinaga, 44, has designed LED-lit gowns shaped like skyscrapers and an air-conditioned dress that cools the person wearing it; and Pillings’s creative director, Ryota Murakami, 36, who says he was teased as a child, has shared his loneliness and grief through knitted sweaters that appear to be hugging themselves. From the veterans, too, there are still surprises. At that fall Comme des Garçons show, Kawakubo’s clothes telegraphed a feeling we don’t often associate with fashion’s most unknowable woman: hope.

Another reason the Japanese avant-garde has endured may be because it never arose in opposition to any one thing. As mainstream luxury became more uniform in its preoccupations, chasing sexiness one year and simplicity the next, fighting the same fights over multiple seasons, Japanese designers kept going a different way, exploring an aesthetic born out of something more fundamental: despair, sorrow, joy, playfulness, the stuff of being human, even and especially when being human means wanting to be someone else for a change. By not undertaking to make us look better than we are — just different — Japanese fashion isn’t a promise that will eventually be broken. Avant-gardes fade away once they’ve built new worlds for someone else to come along and challenge. But Japanese fashion is in perpetual dialogue with itself.

When I went to see him at his studio overlooking the Meguro River in Tokyo’s Shinagawa district, Yamamoto said that, in the act of creating, he always feels both like a beginner and an expert. A mysterious sensation arises when putting on his clothes, like you’re revisiting a place or time that doesn’t exist and maybe never did. In Wim Wenders’s 1989 documentary about Yamamoto, “Notebook on Cities and Clothes,” the German filmmaker, who’d previously taken no interest in fashion, describes his first encounter with Yamamoto’s designs as “an experience of identity.” In the film, he says, “You know the feeling when you put on new clothes? You look at yourself in the mirror — you’re content, excited about your new skin. But with this shirt and this jacket, it was different. From the beginning, they were new and old at the same time.”

Production: Beige Productions