From March 17 to March 22, 37 couture brands showcased their fall 2025 collections for Tokyo Fashion Week, sponsored by Japanese technology company Rakuten. It took place in the Shibuya neighborhood of Tokyo, a major hub for fashion and business alike. Many collections opted for experimental business attire; others chose edgy streetwear as their outlet. But of these 37 runways, four exceptional collections stood out as the stars of the week.
Furumau
Originally operating under the name Chono, founder and head designer Wataru Nakazono formed Furumau last year to emphasize the freedom of fashion — the name is based on the Japanese word “furuimau,” which means “to flutter.” In this collection, Nakazono succeeds in evoking a sense of melancholic springtime, with muted grays dancing alongside rich leafy greens, rosy pinks and foggy blues. These color combinations make one feel like they’re searching through a hazy afternoon mist or a field after a storm. Nakazono’s collection is eclectic and approachable at the same time, maintaining a sense of wearability that many runways neglect in their experimentation.
One of my favorite looks involved a gray-and-purple tartan pattern and a black puffy collar. The tartan has almost a cyberpunk flair here (an impressive feat for a pattern found on the antique blankets at your grandmother’s house), and yet it succeeds in being an item you could feasibly wear in your day-to-day life. Furumau injects personality into its business attire, creating playful pantsuits with polka dots and quilted stripes. Its long floral dresses — a combination of mesh and opaque materials — are another highlight. All of these factors result in a collection that provides a unique pop to a professional wardrobe.
Keiko Nishiyama
Designer Keiko Nishiyama’s collection “Reminiscence,” which she has dedicated to her father Hiroshi Nishiyama, is based on the concept of curiosity. Since the label is based in both Tokyo and London, it fittingly combines influences from both — Japanese kimonos decorated with English “Alice in Wonderland” inspired designs woven in gold. Nishiyama’s clothes feature her own handmade prints depicting fictional flowers and animals that instill a feeling of fantastical wonder that is rooted in the natural world. The prints themselves, upon first glance, appear to be real species, but are surreal enough in their watercolor haze and uncanny nature to pique your interest.
In seas of deep purples and rich pinks, Nishiyami combines bulky durability with passive tranquility in three main phases of the collection. The first phase explores childlike innocence through the usage of pastel colors and floral themes. A thick pastel purple jacket, a smooth gray shirt with a flowery Peter Pan collar and layered floor-length skirts are just a few pieces that capture the sense of growth and optimism that you value as a child.
Then, the collection shifts into its second phase — the purples are now deep and dark, mixing with black funeral attire, and the flowers are nothing more than outlines, or shadows of the past. This second phase emphasizes grief and wrestling with change, with your childhood long dead and feeling like you’ve been left on your own. Restrictive belts represent how this crisis makes us feel trapped, thrust into industries we don’t belong in. The designs are more sparse, indicating a fear that we lose our creativity when we get older.
But don’t worry, the third phase offers a happy ending. The pastel purples are back, splitting the kimonos in half between solid color and sprawling flowers, representing a balance between honoring your inner child and moving forward. This exploration of memory, curiosity and growing up is masterfully done in this cohesive, inventive collection.
mintdesigns
Designed by mintdesign founders Hokuto Katsui and Nao Yagi, the collection “Positive Shape & Negative Shape” centers around embracing negative space. The collection featured formless, breathable clothes that depicted etchings of old villages, loose undeterminable silhouettes and a mostly-navy-and-cream color palette. The clothes seemed to embody various elements, a blend of dark gray striped vests and fuzzy, stark white blouses loomed across the runway like storm clouds.
As the runway pooled with water, dark blue illustrations of sailboats on rivers, paired with thin mesh sleeves that draped like sheets of rain, flowed onto the scene. Earthy browns stood in stark contrast to bright teals and pinks, mirroring the natural harmony of the negative space dirt creates in contrast to solitary flowers. The collection purposefully chose to have just one model for the whole show, highlighting the isolation in empty space. The runway itself had a strangely liminal energy; it took place in the KAIT Plaza, a windowless, low-ceiling venue that mimics the weather outside and is somehow both vast and cramped at the same time. This unease hearkens back to the idea of finding comfort in the uncomfortable, an identity within a shapeless space.
Non Tokyo
This collection from Non Tokyo, designed by Ayano Ichige, combines childlike whimsy with adult silhouettes. It highlights the dissonance that can happen when you enter adulthood but still feel like a child inside — the business attire is oversized and ill-fitting, like a kid wearing their parent’s clothes, yet the mini-tutus are restrictive, showing that the wearer has outgrown them. One particularly bulky camouflage jacket has an incredibly high neckline that wraps around the wearer’s head as though they’re being choked, illustrating the suffocating experience of feeling invisible or lacking a concrete identity.
Many items also have hazy, picturesque images of wild horses, far-off mountains and other scenes that feel irretrievable or too good to be true; this symbolizes the regret many of us feel that we cannot return to the past or live a life different than the one we’ve committed to. The runway also blends absurdly bright colors with beige neutrals, a visual representation of the duality between our inner child’s desires to stand out and our adulthood inclinations to blend in. As cozy swirls and sparkling stars dance smoothly around sleek blazers and solid-colored sweaters, Ichige’s collection is a stunning representation of the identity crises we undergo as we grow up.
Daily Arts Writer Isabella Casagranda can be reached at ijcasa@umich.edu.
