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.

• Twelve Looks That Define Japanese Avant-Garde Fashion

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.”