Renata Espinosa
March 12th, 2007 @ 4:55 PM - Tokyo

The first official day of Japan Fashion Week in Tokyo kicked off on Monday, March 12, with a range of collections that exemplified the wide diversity of Japanese fashion design.

Though Japanese designers have been showing in Tokyo for over 20 years, this is only the fourth installment of "Japan Fashion Week," an event supported by Japan's trade organizations and governmental agencies in order to increase international awareness of the Japanese textile and fashion industry.

"There is a Japanese boom across the globe," said Akira Amari, Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry at the opening reception for Japan Fashion Week at Tokyo landmark the Imperial Hotel. "We want to show our Japanese culture to the world, as well."

Earlier that evening, Minister Amari took his own turn down the catwalk at the show for one of Japan's well-established designers, Junko Koshino, whose sexy collection of vixen-chic body-hugging minidresses and evening gowns were staged around the theme of the red carpet and paparazzi, a phenomenon familiar to Western eyes and an apt symbol of the kind of glamorous associations with celebrity that the fashion industry in Western capitals has come to encompass in recent years.

While Japanese designers such as Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Rei Kawakubo and Junya Watanabe for Comme des Garcons and Jun Takashi of Undercover are well known names across the globe, these designers no longer show in Tokyo, having opted long ago to move their semi-annual ready-to-wear collection showings to Paris. This is the kind of move that the organizers of Japan Fashion Week would like to see change by increasing the presence of international press and buyers in Tokyo.

Two promising collections shown on Monday had a more experimental point of view that will be familiar to and appreciated by international fans of intellectual fashion - Mercibeaucoup and Mintdesigns - and were shown at the beginning and at the end of the day respectively, a fitting first sentence to the week.

Mercibeaucoup's Eti Utsugi worked under Zucca and Tsumori Chisato in Paris, Japanese designers who also both now show their collections in Paris and are under the Issey Miyake group, A-net. Like these designers, Mercibeaucoup is in the "kawaii" school of design - a culture of "cute" in Japan, which translates into exuberant colors, exaggerated volume and an overall happy, bright almost costumish appearance. Mercibeaucoup was first launched last year at Japan Fashion Week.

The theme of Mercibeaucoup's fall/winter 2007 collection was interconnectedness. She used the image of the mushroom as her starting point, the idea being that mushrooms spread and connect to one another but utlimately originate from the same place.

The collection encompassed everything from mushroom prints, intarsia polka dot sweaters and puffy, three dimensional spheres attached to the clothing like spores, to exagerrated puff sleeves and plenty of padded shoulders, to prints of maps - both literal and more abstract renderings of relief maps. It was a psychedelic explosion of color and print in the vein of designers such as Jeremy Scott and Bernhard Willhelm.

Utsugi characterized the Japanese design aesthetic as "something you have to enjoy, and something that you wear with your heart."

Mintdesigns, designed by St. Martins graduates Hokuto Katsui and Nao Yagi showed their fall/winter 2007 collection, entitled "Happy Mistake," in a bookstore at a department store in the Shibuya neighborhood of Tokyo, famous as a gathering place for teenage fashion subcultures. Like Mercibeaucoup, their collection targeted a youthful audience with crisp white shirts underneath jumpers, checked pinafore dresses, textured knee-highs and high paperbag-waisted jumpsuits that called to mind Comme des Garcons in the e80s. Cocoon-like wrap coats paired with skinny pants, still a prevailing streetwear trend now that will continue on for fall, were shown here but the new twist was that the pants or leggings were given graphic prints or a bit of texture in the form of a ruched knee band.

At Hisui, which means "jade," designer Hiroko Ito juxatoposed deconstructed nomadic looks like leather hide tops, skirts cut in organic shapes, knobby, textured knit skirts and Masaii-like neckpieces with structured funnel neck coats and slick, constructed bustier tops while Support Surface proclaimed a "removal of decoration" in designer Norio Surikabe's minimalist variations on basics such as sweaters, coats and dresses that were understated but elegant. The most successful pieces in the collection were sculptural felt coats that displayed restrained volume.