Eight Rising Japanese Designers, Many of Them Disciples of Rei Kawakubo and Issey Miyake

The last show of Paris Men's Fashion Week had a distinctly Japanese flavor.

After London and Milan, this year's men's fashion weeks have finally reached Paris. As the center of fashion, Paris always closes the season, and it has always been picky about who shows there. Most of its lineup is old French houses or high-end Italian labels such as Louis Vuitton and Hermès.

Paris Fashion Week and its men's edition have always favored home-grown design, but foreign names are not missing. Famous Japanese designers such as Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto, who entered the Paris fashion scene in the 1970s and 1980s, are by now regulars on its runways. On June 25, both brands showed new spring/summer 2016 collections at Paris Men's Fashion Week. Rei Kawakubo's Comme des Garçons and KENZO, equally famous Japanese labels, followed close behind.

Issey Miyake, spring/summer 2016 menswear

Yohji Yamamoto, spring/summer 2016 menswear

Comme des Garçons, spring/summer 2016 menswear

This year, though, the schedule held more than these familiar Japanese names. Junya Watanabe and Sacai, two labels from the newer generation of Japanese fashion, also showed at Paris Men's Fashion Week.

Akiko Fukai, a historian of Japanese fashion, has said: "Japan has a rich history in its use of fabric, so Japanese designers naturally choose Paris, the capital of fashion, to have their work judged properly." The fashion expert Motoko Yanagisawa has made a similar point: only Paris can actually make fashion news, and it spreads that news to the world through buyers and fashion journalists from every country. In Japanese fashion, success in Paris has become the highest measure of whether a designer has succeeded at all.

So after Issey Miyake and other big-name predecessors went to Paris Fashion Week in the 1970s and succeeded, more and more new Japanese designers have followed them onto that world stage over the following decades, and have grown into the backbone of Japanese fashion.

Today, Kunihiko Morinaga, Kei Ninomiya, Yasuko Furuta, Jun Takahashi, Junya Watanabe, Junichi Abe, Chitose Abe and Chisato Tsumori are arguably the eight most closely watched new designers in Japan.

Junya Watanabe, spring/summer 2016 menswear

Sacai, spring/summer 2016 menswear

That Junya Watanabe and Chitose Abe's Sacai both showed at Paris Men's Fashion Week this time is a sign of these designers' growing influence. They also owe much to the predecessors who, in the last century, were the first to break into world fashion and win Japan a place in it, above all the avant-garde "three masters": Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo.

From the mid-19th century, when the Englishman Charles Frederick Worth became the first haute couture designer in Paris, European designers ruled the world's fashion system for more than a century. By the 1920s, old Parisian houses such as Chanel and Dior had come to dominate and cemented the leading position of the French fashion system. Their structured style, which shaped clothes closely to the body and accentuated the female figure, became the mainstream of the day. Only in the 1970s and 1980s did a group of Japanese designers, with a distinctly Eastern idea of dress, arrive on the Paris stage and break the Europeans' monopoly.

Issey Miyake was the first designer to declare that "form matters more than trend, and concept more than clothing." He went to Paris in 1965 to study fashion but held on to a Japanese idea of dress. He rejected the three-dimensional cutting on dress forms then popular in Paris. Instead he started from flat, straight lines and built layered, draped, irregular shapes. This straight-cut, "unstructured" look, with no waist at all, stood in sharp contrast to the close-fitting tailoring of the old Parisian houses, and it started the "deconstructionist" wave in fashion.

Issey Miyake

Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo arrived at Paris Fashion Week together in 1981, and their loose, asymmetrical, strange silhouettes shocked a European fashion world that was then conservative and in a slump. As Brenda Polan, fashion editor of The Guardian, recalled: "Paris had never seen clothes like that before: black, free, loose. They started an argument about traditional beauty, elegance and gender." A Japanese wave had arrived on the world's fashion stage, and no one could ignore it.

These three giants of avant-garde fashion went on to influence many European designers. The famous Belgian designers known as the "Antwerp Six" emerged under the influence of this Japanese wave and produced a great deal of avant-garde work. Well-known designers such as Calvin Klein and Jil Sander also became eager to borrow Japanese cutting, especially Yohji Yamamoto's and Rei Kawakubo's techniques of layering and draping.

In March 1981, Time ran a cover story titled "How Did Japan Do It?" The magazine was analyzing the remarkable results of Japan's postwar boom from an economic angle, but the question would have fit the fashion world of the time just as well.

This "Japanese new wave" of the 1970s and 1980s punched a large hole in Europe's long monopoly on world fashion, and it made the path to that stage easier for today's new Japanese designers. The three giants' influence on Japanese fashion goes further still. Of the eight new Japanese designers most closely watched today, we found, more than half are disciples of the three.

Rei Kawakubo's influence is clearly no smaller than it was in the last century, and her company has become the biggest training ground for new Japanese designers. She runs programs for young designers in her stores in London, New York and Tokyo, and the disciples on her Comme des Garçons team are even free to create work of their own. Four of these eight rising designers came out of Kawakubo's house, and the others have close ties to her too. Junya Watanabe joined Comme des Garçons as an assistant doing fairly minor pattern-making work. Kawakubo noticed him and later promoted him to run a product line. In 1994 he went solo and founded a brand under his own name, but Kawakubo's support did not end there: she personally put up money for him and backed his growth. Some even say that without Rei Kawakubo there might be no Junya Watanabe today. Her shadow shows in the brand's daring color mixes, its upside-down asymmetrical designs and its lengthened sleeves.

Junichi Abe

Junichi Abe also began as a pattern cutter at Comme des Garçons, and in 2004 founded his own brand, Kolor. His designs center on draping, pleats, layering and exaggerated, architectural silhouettes, and his habit of combining different materials in unusual ways is also close to Kawakubo's. Chitose Abe, his wife, is an outstanding designer in her own right; both once cut patterns for Kawakubo. In 1999 Chitose Abe founded Sacai, which carries on Kawakubo's play with "cool," and its unusual shapes have made it one of the fastest-rising labels of the past five years.

Kei Ninomiya

Then there is Kei Ninomiya, another former pattern cutter at Comme des Garçons, who founded his own label, Noir Kei Ninomiya, in 2012. Kawakubo famously won praise from the foreign press for her use of black, and Ninomiya has inherited that love of black: black biker jackets and little black dresses are his signature looks. He is also adept at unconventional cutting and patchwork.

Kawakubo is not the only one training young designers; Issey Miyake does too. Chisato Tsumori, Miyake's favorite protégée, has swept through the fashion world in recent years almost as his heir, and has drawn intense attention ever since she set up on her own. Her designs are strongly Japanese. Like Miyake, she is devoted to kimono culture, and she often takes her inspiration from the prints and color combinations of kimonos.

None of the eight is a "disciple" of Yohji Yamamoto, but Yamamoto has also been searching for young talent. Ragne Kikas, who emerged from the 2012 Hyères fashion festival competition, made her name with distinctive knitwear. Yamamoto, who chaired the jury, gave her the Première Vision prize, then extended an offer to the Estonian designer and took her into his circle.

As Japanese fashion grows stronger, Tokyo has been called the unofficial fifth fashion capital of the world. Can these new designers take Japanese fashion to a new peak? Can designers who came up under the three giants surpass their masters? First, let us look at each of them more closely.

Junya Watanabe, fall/winter 2015

Junya Watanabe

Junya Watanabe is no longer a young designer; he was already working under Kawakubo in the 1980s. In the brand's early years, because Watanabe focused on clothes for everyday life and kept a low profile himself, the label made only modest headway and showed no interest in the mass market. In recent years, though, collaborations with Joyce, Loewe and others have raised his profile worldwide, and his designs have become more and more artistic, such as the geometric "honeycomb" shapes he showed at Paris Fashion Week for fall/winter 2015. He has gradually become a favorite of fashion editors, and his clothes appear in street-style photos of fashion figures such as Leandra Medine and Taylor Tomasi.

Kunihiko Morinaga

Kunihiko Morinaga

Kunihiko Morinaga belongs to the younger generation of Japanese fashion. He is good at combining clothing with technology, for example bringing 3D printing and thermal imaging into his own brand, which has earned him the name "revolutionary of the digital age." At Japan Fashion Week, models for his brand Anrealage wore tech-assisted pieces such as mechanical hems and lantern skirts lit by ultraviolet light. The shows were well received at home, and in recent years the brand has made the move from Tokyo to Paris. Morinaga has also inherited the three giants' deconstructionist ideas. The brand's motto, "overturning the structure of clothing," runs through all his work: trousers with oversized, very loose waists, for instance, or trousers that fold at the side. The result is odd and distinctive.

Kei Ninomiya

Kei Ninomiya

Ninomiya's designs are defined by cutting technique and precise detail, which keep the focus on the clothes themselves. A skilled pattern maker, he likes to bring out the three-dimensional form of a garment in many ways: cutting holes of every kind into a blazer and then adding fringe to the surface to give it volume, or weaving fabric in crisscross patterns so that it takes on a geometric, sculptural look.

TOGA, spring/summer 2015

Yasuko Furuta

In the 16 years since its founding, Yasuko Furuta's own brand, TOGA, has spread to more than 30 countries. "Toga" means "sacred robe" in Greek myth, and the brand's style combines innocence with an independent, avant-garde streak. In this year's spring/summer 2015 collection, for instance, the main elements were trench coats printed like abstract paintings, patchwork jeans and asymmetrical mirror images, and its blend of the real and the unreal drew attention. Furuta has taken a fairly traditional path for a designer: build steadily at home first, then expand abroad in various ways. In 2008 Joyce began carrying TOGA, which opened the Chinese market to her. Today the brand is also sold on websites such as Net-A-Porter and MatchesFashion, where shoppers all over the world can find it.

Undercover

Jun Takahashi

Undercover was founded in 1994 and is rooted in street culture. Its designer, Jun Takahashi, entered the Paris fashion world ten years after founding the brand and quickly drew attention. The label has always been known for a vivid style that is surreal, beautiful and eerie at once, as with the reversible clothing it launched in 2000: trousers could turn into skirts and back, and a denim skirt could become an evening gown. Its bold, rebellious designs have made it a cult label in streetwear. In 2011 Undercover also launched a collaborative running line with Nike, and its fame now comes close to rivaling Kawakubo's. The brand has not neglected its home market either, with 30 outlets in Japan.

Junichi Abe

Chitose Abe, Sacai

Junichi Abe

The husband-and-wife team of Junichi Abe and Chitose Abe also deserves mention. Their styles are similar. Junichi Abe's clothes are mainly for wearing at home, and his brand Kolor designs for ordinary people, often taking its inspiration from the details of daily life. He uses Japanese garment factories and has always held on to what is distinctly Japanese. Thanks to its high standards of manufacture, Kolor is widely known in Japan.

Chitose Abe

His wife, Chitose Abe, is no less formidable. Her brand Sacai began with an elegant, understated style, offering traditional Japanese clothing in the vein of Muji. Its first menswear collection, launched in 2009, was very well received, and it also teamed up with Moncler on the Moncler S line, which is sold at stores such as Dover Street Market.

Chisato Tsumori

Chisato Tsumori

Chisato Tsumori keeps Miyake's simple combinations and clean lines, but in pattern and color she has created a romantic, fairy-tale style of her own, marked by soft fabrics and romantic colors and prints. Her girlish, innocent, dreamy look has made her a fashion godmother to young people in Japan, and even the Taiwanese model Lin Chi-ling has said she loves the brand. As Miyake's foremost disciple, Tsumori already drew plenty of attention. Repeated shows at Paris Fashion Week, and the brand's arrival on Farfetch, the global platform for fashion boutiques, are bringing it to more and more people.

In recent years "Chinese style" has been in vogue, and we are quietly pleased to see Chinese fashion's influence spread. But it was Japanese designers who first grasped the subtlety of Eastern aesthetics and set out to study and pursue it, and Japan's influence on world fashion should not be underestimated. Domenico Dolce, a co-founder of Dolce&Gabbana, which has just shown at Milan Men's Fashion Week, said: "There are already too many things about fashion in Europe." Perhaps, in the future, it will be Asia's turn to add something.