Tokyo Creative Salon sees the city as both runway and canvas
It is a spring midday on March 13, and the opening event of Tokyo Creative Salon 2025 is unfolding at Tokyu Plaza Harajuku's cultural hub, Harakado. The space, which will serve as the festival's nerve center through March 23, is alive with the hum of conversation and the shuffle of designers, artists and industry insiders moving through immersive installations and fashion showcases.
Across 10 districts of Tokyo, from Shibuya to Marunouchi, parallel creative expressions are taking shape, but here — on the symbolic nexus between Tokyo street fashion and haute couture — the city's restless, shape-shifting creative spirit is on full display.
Launched in 2020, Tokyo Creative Salon (TCS) has quickly cemented itself as one of Japan's preeminent festivals of interdisciplinary creativity. Unlike the insular trade shows of Paris or the commercial juggernauts of Milan, TCS takes a more egalitarian approach, embedding design and fashion within the streetscape and transforming neighborhoods into living exhibitions where passersby are as much participants as they are spectators.
'Our aim is to make fashion and design accessible to the public at large, rather than being the preserve of a limited number of people,' explains Takeshi Hirouchi, chairman of the Tokyo Creative Salon Executive Committee, via email.
Takeshi Horouchi delivers an address during the official opening the 2025 iteration of Tokyo Creative Salon. |
ERIK AUGUSTIN PALM
This year's edition, running from March 13 to 23, coincides appropriately with Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo (March 17 to 22). The overlap is no accident — fashion is a primary pillar of TCS, and the concurrent scheduling allows for a blending of creative disciplines.
'Tokyo is a large city, and even within the same city, areas like Marunouchi, Nihonbashi, Shibuya, Harajuku, Akasaka (and) Shinjuku have different aesthetic characteristics,' Hirouchi continues. 'The identity of TCS is that it brings together these different faces of the city and presents creations that are rooted in the local area. And because it is set in a city, its creations are accessible to everyone.'
At the heart of this participatory ethos is the festival's defining concept: 'The Street is the Runway.' And the festival's Tokyo Quest Gacha, an interactive city-wide game, encourages attendees to engage with installations scattered throughout Tokyo, rewarding curiosity with artistic discovery.
'We consider the participatory gacha to be a small device to encourage people to express their own creations rather than passively,' says Seichi Saito, general creative director, using the term for capsule toy vending machines. 'Expressing their own Tokyo creative place is an active experience.'
The Tokyo Gacha Quest is one of many ways Tokyo Creative Salon seeks to turn people passing by installations throughout Tokyo into full participants. |
ERIK AUGUSTIN PALM
For a visitor, the sheer breadth of the event can be exhilarating. Marc Nickel, a 37-year-old German who works as a 3D artist in Tokyo's fashion industry, sees this democratization of design as crucial: 'TCS definitely has a positive impact on Tokyo's creative scene, as it is a public showcase of talent and a chance for up-and-coming artists. The public gets to see what's going on in the creative fields, and it is a good opportunity to connect with other designers and artists.'
Among the highlights shaping the week, Nickel looks forward to Yohji Yamamoto's Pour Homme Pop-Up Store, which runs through March 18 in Yurakucho and offers a deep dive into the world of deconstructed elegance, as well as the March 21-23 showcase of the Sashiko Gals, an emerging brand devoted to meticulously hand-stitched sneakers. Meanwhile, the House in Noto installation running through March 23 in Roppongi reimagines materials salvaged from homes lost in the 2024 Noto earthquake, recontextualizing them as art objects — an exercise in both remembrance and renewal.
Beyond fashion and design, the festival embraces urban playfulness. The Ginza Quest, a smartphone-guided scavenger hunt, turns the glitzy shopping district into an interactive puzzle, while Live Stock Market in Marunouchi reinvents unsellable deadstock merchandise through the curation of stylist Hiroshi Ozawa. Meanwhile, at Haneda Airport, the Sitting in the Sky installation, which features stools in the shape of clouds, offers a moment of serenity before takeoff, transforming a transitory space into a contemplative one.
The festival's ambition is, very clearly, not just to stage an event but to reinforce Tokyo's identity as a dynamic creative organism — a place where historical legacies, contemporary experiments and future innovations intertwine, not merely as displays but as lived experiences.
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