Tokyo bought two ex-Uniqlo designers a Paris runway
The Fashion Prize of Tokyo went to the denim label TANAKA on Saturday, funding runway shows in Paris in January and June next year for designer Sayori Tanaka and creative director Akira Kuboshita.
The brand had around 100 stockists worldwide when WWD reviewed its first Paris presentation in January 2024, among them Bergdorf Goodman, 10 Corso Como and United Arrows in Japan.
The Fashion Prize of Tokyo went to TANAKA, a denim label built by the pair who ran Uniqlo's global womenswear and menswear design teams.
The prize is co-hosted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the Japan Fashion Week Organization, sponsored by Japan Airlines with Senken Shimbun as media partner, and sits one step above the Tokyo Fashion Award in the same organisation's ladder. It selects one already-established Tokyo designer a year and pays for a Paris collection show.
TANAKA won the Tokyo Fashion Award's 2023 edition, announced in September 2022. Four years later it has climbed the rung above.
What the winners bring to that is unusual for a state-funded design prize. Tanaka led womenswear on Uniqlo's global design team across its Tokyo, Shanghai and New York offices, after starting in knitwear at Yohji Yamamoto. Kuboshita held the equivalent menswear role, working in knitwear and activewear, and joined TANAKA as creative partner in 2020, according to the organisation's own brand profile.
The label was founded in 2017, is based in New York, is unisex, and grew through showrooms in Paris and Milan into a business that sells mainly in Europe.
Photo from TANAKA lookbook
Tokyo, in other words, has chosen to fund the export of a brand two mass-market veterans already built commercially, on foreign soil, without it.
That is defensible on the prize's own terms, which are about producing designers who succeed on the world stage rather than about need. A body spending public money on a Paris show has an argument for spending it where the buyers already answer the phone.
It sits awkwardly against the rest of the season. In a release on 28 July, the same organisation gave no Grand Prix at all in the JFW Next Brand Award, the prize designed to buy a first show for a young brand, saying its finalists lacked the financial strength to keep showing.
Read across the three awards, Tokyo funded the top of its ladder and the middle this season, and left the bottom rung empty.
The support does not stop at the runway. Tokyo Fashion Award winners now get pop-up shops in Seoul as well as Paris, which puts Japanese labels into the Korean market in the same weeks Korean labels are trying to get out of it.
Tanaka has been explicit for years about what she is building. Speaking to WWD in January 2024, she said many people love Japanese denim, but "there is not a strong Japanese denim label yet".
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The Fashion Prize of Tokyo will fund two Paris runway shows for TANAKA, the denim label built by Uniqlo's former global design leads.