From women's underwear to men's street wear, Japan knows its market

Cinderellas deserve Gomi Hayakawa’s Feast

Frustrated by the lack of attractive bras suitable for the slighter Japanese frame, Tama Art University student Gomi Hayakawa started a crowdsourced fundraiser last year to see if she wasn’t alone in wanting something different from the sporty or heavily padded options she was expected to settle for.

The response was extraordinary, with Hayakawa reaching well over her funding target, which allowed the young designer to fund a fashion show as well as a pajama line in addition to the original lingerie. The resulting brand, Feast, is designed to flatter what Hayakawa affectionately terms “Cinderella busts” with sizes spanning from AAA to A, and it has a very keen online following.

In a curious twist of fate, Hayakawa is now being besieged with requests to produce larger sizes of her exceptionally cute designs, and her swimwear line, which launched earlier this month is her first lineup to include sizes up to a C cup.

Those interested in this one-woman bra revolution can head to the Popikyawa Festival in Omotesando, July 18 and 19, where Feast will be offering a measuring service in addition to the brand’s full line-up.

feast.theshop.jp bit.ly/popikyawa

The luxury sneaker is running its course

The trend for excruciatingly extravagant street-wear basics is showing no sign of letting up. In fact, the major fashion houses seem to be engaged in a unspoken competition to see who can render the most mundane fashion staple with the most ludicrous excess.

The latest entry to the arena is from Parisian favorite Dior, which, not content with launching its own line of sneakers for those who wanting to add a bit of glamour to a strenuous work out, have set about customizing said sneakers with couture-level beading and sequin work.

The end result is something that is undeniably at the peak of both performance and ostentatiousness — and something that you will need between ¥145,000 and ¥210,000 to get hold of. Not only that, but you had better be faster than you plan to run in them, as the designs reportedly rarely stay in stock once they hit the store.

This month marks a pre-fall addition of a high-cut variant to the lineup, so if you want to get ahead of the game, and can afford to do so, you know what to do: get running.

Dior Fusion Sneakers are now available at Dior stockists nationwide.

www.dior.com/home/ja_jp

Paris, Tokyo: Japan’s menswear goes overseas

Tokyo’s menswear has often been tipped as the country’s best bet to make inroads in Europe. Last month’s Paris and Milan fashion weeks, saw that promise fulfilled by Hiromichi Ochiai’s Facetasm show at Georgio Armani’s behest in Milan, and Yosuke Aizawa’s collaboration with Adidas on a full collection in Paris.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Tokyo Fashion Award program also took Yoshikazu Yamagata’s un-and-coming Written By and WrittenAfterwards labels to a Le Marais showroom, where the designer was joined by old-hands Factotum, John Lawrence Sullivan and others. The Leather Japan project, too, took a number of brands to Paris, with edgy biker label Blackmeans going down particularly well with foreign buyers.

It was not only buyers, however, who were courting Japan’s talent, designers were also channeling Japanese style, with Thom Browne inspired by the kimono for his menswear collection and Loewe’s shameless love letter to Japanese pop culture, which used photos taken in Akihabara on its invitations and quotes from the “Gundam” anime series on this season’s prints.

From women"s underwear to men"s street wear, Japan knows its market