Casablanca brings playfulness and Japanese kawaii culture to Paris Fashion Week for autumn/winter 2025

The National

06-03-2025

French-Moroccan designer Charaf Tajer looked to Japan for autumn/winter 2025, sending a co-ed collection down the runway at Paris Fashion Week. Backdropped by noren curtains (the flat cloths that hang in Japanese doorways), there was an opening parade of serious suits and coats worn on shoulders in black and blood red that had a Yakuza-type menace. The tailoring – with jackets and shirts left collarless and wrapped rather than buttoned – was about showing a grown-up side to Tajer's Casablanca brand. This quickly gave way to more familiar Casablanca territory, mixing sporty separates and slinky tops in searing colours and bonkers patterning that offered up kawaii happiness, the pop culture aesthetic based on the Japanese word for cute. What Casablanca does so well is pulling in all manner of inspirations and feeding these through Tajer's uniquely upbeat vision. This is one reason the brand is beloved in the Middle East and around the world. Tajer excels at bold colours: on wide-cut shirts splashed with vaguely trippy imagery, and snappy sports-infused clothes that run to wide-leg trousers in terry cloth, zip-front tracksuit tops cropped extra short and flippy tennis skirts or even fluffy mohair jumpers. Tajer knows how to do comfort, with the sort of easy, breezy streetwear that speaks to the cool kids whether they are in Los Angeles, London, Dubai or Tokyo. Case in point: in January Casablanca staged a pop-up in Abu Dhabi called the Casablanca Tennis Club, on Al Hudayriyat Island, that mixed sport and fashion, for its first immersive event in the region. For autumn/winter, this same spirit was expressed for men as an acid green satin bomber jacket worn with a shirt and tie, a swirling red patterned shirt under a suit, and a cosy shearling zip-neck top covered in tiny embroidery. There was a fabulous boxy jacket in mauve ostrich leather that oozed laidback luxe, especially worn with tracksuit pants. There were also wide-legged capoeira tracksuit pants – with gleaming ribbons of colour down each leg – worn with a matching track top or a silky shirt decorated with heli-skiing scenes. For women there were zip-fronted mini dresses in retro diagonals, lightweight shimmery long-sleeve polo tops paired with sequinned mini skirts, and even a cropped, quilted ski set in powder pink that veered dangerously close to Chanel, dotted with camellia flowers. Wide, low-slung satin trousers and shrunken knitted tops appeared to be straight out of Harajuku, Toyko's youthful fashion centre, while long sheer socks worn with trainers added modern attitude. This collection showed that Tajer is widening his brand's offerings to include more dressy, even evening propositions, but he is most at home – and at his most enchanting- with street-savvy gear that speaks of, and to, the cool kids.