Paris has twelve Japanese houses this week

Photo: Rhododendrites / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Twelve Japanese houses are on the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode's final calendar for the spring-summer 2027 womenswear season, which opened in Paris on Monday and runs to 6 October.

Nine of them have runway shows. Two Korean houses are on the same calendar, according to the FHCM, and both are presentations: Kimhekim on the opening day and Eenk on the last.

Mame Kurogouchi and Anrealage showed on Tuesday. Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto show on Friday, Junya Watanabe, Noir Kei Ninomiya and Comme des Garçons on Saturday, Sacai on Monday, and Ujoh and CFCL on the closing day. Undercover and Junko Shimada are presenting.

China has five houses and one runway show, Uma Wang's on Thursday. Taiwan's Shiatzy Chen shows on Monday.

The gap explains something that happened in Seoul three weeks ago. Seoul Fashion Week split itself between a design museum and the Lotte World Tower, put QR codes on the clothes and wired the runway into a department store's online mall, a fashion week rebuilt as a retail channel.

Nine Japanese labels have runway slots on the official calendar. Korea has two presentations, but nothing on a catwalk.

A city whose designers have two presentation slots on the calendar that sets the season has limited reason to run its own week as a buyer's market. Tokyo, whose houses hold nine of Paris's sixty-eight runway slots, has the opposite problem: its domestic week showed 28 collections this month, down from 33 in March, and gave no Grand Prix in its emerging-designer award.

Neither city's week is the main event for its own best-known labels, and both have responded by making the domestic week about something else.

Against that, the calendar is a lagging indicator and a slow one. Comme des Garçons has shown in Paris since 1981, Yohji Yamamoto since 1981, Issey Miyake since 1973. Most of Japan's twelve are the accumulated result of a generation that arrived before the current Korean designer industry existed in any commercial form.

Kimhekim is also a qualification rather than an illustration. Kim In-tae presented in Paris on Monday, twenty-five days after showing the label's tenth-anniversary collection at Seoul Fashion Week with Adidas underwriting the runway. A designer can now do both cities in one season.

Eenk, on the closing day, has held a Paris slot for several seasons. Two houses is a small number, but it is not zero.

What the calendar does settle is the direction of the pipeline. Paris is where a house's standing is established, and Japan holds a position there that took forty years to build and cannot be assembled quickly.

SOURCES (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

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