Living: Showroom At the Top

Forget the summit. Let's get down to serious Japanese business here. Not every VIP visiting Tokyo last week was wrangling over the yen and fretting over international terrorism. Anna Maria Craxi, the stylish and ebullient wife of Italy's Prime Minister, was asked through the usual very proper channels what she would like to see during her visit. Kabuki, perhaps? Tea ceremony? A Buddhist temple? Craxi had another idea: an Issey Miyake fashion show. So, snug within the security perimeter of her hotel, Craxi got a close look at some of the world's most beautiful clothes at a presentation narrated by the designer himself.

Too bad she didn't get to town a few weeks earlier. From April 9 through 17, Tokyo played host to its second official season of fashion shows, 33 in all, featuring standout work not only by Miyake and the other two members of the Tokyo triumvirate (Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garons) but by a brace of younger, less familiar talent. Although the so-called Japanese look has got roughed up--even as it has been ripped off--by the fashion establishment, and much of the fashion press tries to write it off and wipe it out, the Tokyo shows demonstrate a true trade surplus of design vitality. Tokyo may not be fully a fashion capital yet, but it is well on its way.

The Tokyo shows were organized by a council of premier designers created by Yohji Yamamoto, Kawakubo, Miyake, Mitsuhiro Matsuda, Kansai Yamamoto and Hanae Mori to wedge the country's talent into the traditional fashion route: Milan, Paris, New York. Paris is still the major market, however, even for Tokyo's finest. "Showing there, from the design point of view, is more intense," Kawakubo says. "It's the first presentation of my new work in front of journalists from all over the world." These, however, are not the best of times for any design that makes demands on the initiative and imagination of the wearer. "It may sound a bit harsh," says Yohji Yamamoto, "but Europe's snobbishness is equal to America's conservatism. To people living in a conservative world, new fashions, new trends and new designs are like something you see in the theater: you clap, but you never live what you see."

Western design professionals recognize that the Japanese have worked changes in the look and line of conventional clothes as radical as anything that has happened in fashion in the past quarter-century. Notes Laura Sinderbrand, director of the design laboratory at New York City's Fashion Institute of Technology: "They were in the forefront of giving us new shapes. They helped us break out of the mold of the set-in sleeve, fitted waistlines, rounded necklines." "Every single fashion designer has copied their skirts, shapes, wraps," comments Alan Bilzerian, who sells a lot of Japanese design in his forward-looking Boston and Worcester, Mass., stores. "They have inspired the entire world and told them to get off their rears." "Their innovations," says Jessica Mitchell, vice president and fashion director for sportswear at Saks Fifth Avenue, "have become part of the language of fashion."