29-07-2025
Keisukeyoshida Tokyo Spring 2026 Collection
'Rest and Relaxation' was the title of Keisuke Yoshida's show this season, which took place on a muggy summer night at Estnation, a fashionable department store in Roppongi Hills (and one of the designer's stockists). A foreboding bass thrummed and whined over the speakers, rattling the light fixtures as the models came out, their office pumps clacking on the store tiles. What had Yoshida devised for his woman this time?
She was certainly in need of some R&R. Her jeans had their pockets pulled up into the waistband, the sides sagging and the front buttons intentionally open (but still secured with an unseen popper), suggesting a state of undress, while slim-fitting suit trousers clung tightly to the thighs. Upside down camisoles, a recurring motif in Yoshida's collections, were turned into skirts, their straps dangling over the legs, while other pleated skirts were twisted at the knees. Office blazers had their lapels warped and rumpled, or were given belt loops at the neck with leather belts hanging at the shoulders—a smack of the designer's trademark sadism, though his usual spiky pin heels had been swapped for relatively low, beaten-up pumps.
Halfway through the show the mood shifted. Models appeared wearing folded straw hats known as kasa, traditionally worn by dancers during the Obon festival, held to honor the spirits of one's ancestors. Painted black and pulled forward to obscure the models' faces, they took on a threatening aura, evoking something between an Irving Penn photograph and Ridley Scott's Alien, and were worn with pencil skirts and blouses, some of which extended into strips that wrapped across the throat. He also collaborated with the graphic designer Tom Tosseyn, known for his work with Raf Simons, on the subtly embroidered 'KY' logos that gave some of the pieces the air of spa uniforms.
'I tried to look at the current era from a bird's-eye view,' he explained backstage afterwards. 'It's busy, there's a lot of information, you work all the time, and you're exhausted.' The disciplined but intentionally disheveled pieces told a story of the human vulnerability that even the most buttoned-up woman can't stop from seeping out at times. 'I imagine an independent woman, but deep inside she has some pain she is carrying, or some tiredness she is hiding. But even so, I think she lives a strict life, and I wanted to make that part beautiful as well,' he said.
It was classic Keisuke: twisted, perverse, commanding, and glamorous. The designer knows well how to project his own fantasy, how to create a character that feels fully formed. What he is still figuring out is evolving this fantasy into something more women themselves will actually want to embody.
