Pact of creation

Anyone interested in finding out what ultra fashion- conscious young Tokyoites are wearing should take a seat in the canteen of Bunka Fashion College, Japan’s highly rated fashion school. As it turns out, the young bloods of Japanese style are wearing anything and everything: there are Lolitas in lace caps, anime-inspired goths and young fogies in jackets and ties. There are platforms, pearls, piercings, military jackets, hats with pointy equine ears, the odd designer label (worn ironically) and, of course, hair styled in myriad hues and cuts. At lunchtime, students wearing clothes that reference subcultures that nobody over the age of 25 can hope to understand huddle together. It’s a scintillating, frequently incomprehensible, parade.

Bunka’s alumni list is a dazzling who’s who of Japanese fashion, from Kenzo Takada and Yohji Yamamoto to Junya Watanabe, Jun Takahashi (Undercover), Nigo (of A Bathing Ape fame) and more recently, Ryota Iwai (Auralee), Maiko Kuroguchi and Shinpei Goto, whose label Masu is a student favourite. The college was founded by Isaburo Namiki as the Namiki Women’s and Children’s Dressmaking School in 1919. It became Bunka Fashion College in 1936, the same year that it began publishing So-en, Japan’s first fashion magazine (which is still going strong). Bunka started admitting men in 1957 (Kenzo was among the early intake). The current building, a vast edifice in Shinjuku, opened in 1998 and today there are 3,300 students learning about design, textiles, jewellery, styling, marketing, modelling, knitwear and many other aspects of the fashion business.

The big hitters emerge from the design course. Satoshi Morimoto is one of the teachers. The fashionable 30-something from Osaka with bleach-tipped hair is helping a student who is trying to upcycle a pair of jeans. “I want to teach the students to be disciplined but, at the same time, I hope that they can enjoy expressing themselves through fashion, have the freedom to dream up ideas and always be curious and willing to take on new challenges,” he says. One advantage of Bunka, he tells monocle, is its location in central Tokyo “where new things are constantly being created”. He says that it can be hard to spot the stars of the future. Some of the most successful have been the quietest students.

A visit to Bunka quickly reveals why Japanese designers are so technically skilled and prone to splicing fabrics at every opportunity – every design student has to master sewing and pattern cutting. No exceptions. In one classroom, a teacher is patiently going through the steps of making darts in a skirt. In another, a mannequin is draped in swaths of tulle. Morimoto says that the school’s technical teaching is a defining feature. “These pattern and sewing techniques have been passed down and developed for 100 years.” Computers play their part in Bunka but not at the expense of hands-on experience. The school even has its own fabric shop and another store selling all of the equipment that the would-be designer might need.

“It’s always about sewing and more sewing,” says one second-year undergraduate. What the students don’t always appreciate is that those skills will be what separates them from the rest. Just as the best abstract artists have put in the hours to master figurative drawing first, so these students will have all the tools that they need to de- and reconstruct any garment they choose. In the corridor of the design department, mannequins are clad in pieces that students have meticulously recreated from photographs.

The Bunka students monocle meets rarely aspire to be the next Alexander McQueen or Rei Kawakubo. They seem to have little to no interest in famous names or even in fashion history. Nineteen-year-old Haruto Ogawa made a name for himself at his Bunka matriculation by printing a giant picture of himself on his trousers. He did the same with a bag and now gets requests via Instagram. A rebellious soul, he changes his look every day. Today he’s channelling the distinctive silhouette of a Japanese construction worker – slinky black top, balloon trousers (worn perilously low) and split-toed jika-tabi footwear.

You might think that the students here would be poring over style magazines and following the global fashion cycle but they’re more likely to be scrolling through Instagram or window shopping for obscure labels at The Four-Eyed select shop in Kabukicho. “I don’t follow famous designers,” says Ogawa. “I like niche brands from around Asia.” Notions of gendered fashion are out the window too. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” he says.

They might not be drawn to commerce but the average Bunka graduate is still likely to find gainful employment. Final-year creative design student Karin Tsujino already has stylists knocking on her door, clamouring to borrow her complicated candy-coloured tulle confections. She’s also dressing Japanese entertainers whose look is their strongest talent. Tsujino describes her work as “kawaii [cute] but not” and tries to explain the labyrinthine meanings of kawaii. Outsiders tend to think that it means saccharine and cutesy but kawaii can also be edgy and dark; even punk can be kawaii. Tusjino loves battle anime. “I want my work to reflect Tokyo culture,” she says. “It’s about Japanese music and anime as much as clothes.”

Final-year student Miu Beppu is wearing a hand-stitched parka by Keisuke Kanda (another Bunka graduate now making his name in Tokyo’s fashion world), knickerbockers and tassel loafers. She is part of a kawaii collective in Bunka called Ramb and already has a job lined up at a Kyoto lingerie company. Soon-to-graduate knitwear star Aiha Mori, who took up knitting during the coronavirus pandemic, is another member of Ramb. Mori’s been snapped up by a manufacturer that makes knitwear for top Japanese brands such as Sacai.

Every December the college hosts a fashion-design contest. The grand finale is a professional affair, with a proper runway and a pumping soundtrack. It’s standing-room only and the hall is packed with students and teachers. The finalists present one look each and it’s a big deal to take the top prize. Sera Kawasaki offers up a futuristic take on outdoor wear with a jacket and rucksack sculpted as a single piece, modelled by his friend, who stomps down the catwalk, hood up, shades on.

With his baseball cap and pearl earrings, Takumi Ogura has all the swagger of a model but is an aspiring second-year designer. His impressive lace construction is given life by his friend Mai Saito, who sways down the runway. At 27, Ogura is older than the average student and has an unusual back story. “I used to work in construction but I dreamt of being a fashion designer.” His background gives him a hunger; impatience even. “I don’t want to work for anyone else,” he says. “I want to set up on my own.”

The winner is William Cooke, a softly spoken student from Portland, Oregon, who has created a tailored leather two-piece  inspired by bamboo craft and lacquer. Cooke is one of a cohort of international students who have to learn Japanese as well as the skills required to make it in fashion in Japan. He had spent a year in Niigata and decided to combine his interest in Japan and fashion by applying to study here. “Bunka is very different from other fashion schools in New York, London or Paris because the focus is on technique and sewing,” he says. “They don’t really teach you anything about design.” The students are different too, he says. “They’re not interested in collections, runways and designers; fashion is more of a lifestyle for them. I lean towards realistic, wearable clothing but at Bunka, fashion can be anything, your own fantasy.”

Adrienne Guilbaud, who is from Florida, says that the language, coronavirus and the compulsory sewing and pattern-cutting elements made the first year tough. “The Japanese spoken at Bunka is not the same as the Japanese I was being taught at school,” she says. “In the US, you might be going to college a couple of times a week but here it’s nine to five every day.” Guilbaud, who loves the Lolita style and draws inspiration from drag culture in Shinjuku’s Ni-chome neighbourhood, is loving Bunka now, thriving on its creative freedom. She is hoping to stay for a master’s degree. “Teachers here never say that a design is bad; they just tell you how to achieve it technically. The fashion market couldn’t be more different from the US. In Florida we all wear shorts and a tank top.”

For fashion references, teachers can go to the basement resource centre, run by head curator Tamiko Ueda. After nearly 30 years at Bunka, she has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the archive, which hangs on revolving racks according to type, including tracksuits, denim, eveningwear, garments made by students. The more precious pieces are curtained off: vintage Pierre Cardin, a solid collection of Kenzo pieces and an impressive section dedicated to “Swingin’ London”, stocked with psychedelic prints and Biba originals. There are 35,000 items (including hats, shoes and accessories) in the collection; the Bunka Gakuen Costume Museum is next door too.

Bunka has long had international connections. The first foreign student, Virya Chitinanda, came from Thailand in 1955 (the same year the school’s famous cylindrical campus building, now demolished, opened). Christian Dior, accompanied by seven models, held a show at Bunka in 1953; Pierre Cardin visited a couple of times and became an honorary professor in 1961. There have been European tours and tie-ups with colleges everywhere from New York to Shanghai. But the recent collapse of the yen, however, is making stints as colleges such as London’s Central Saint Martins or the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp out of reach for most Japanese fashion students.

A Bunka degree still opens doors in the Japanese fashion business. Some students, like Ogura, want to go it alone, while others follow other creative pursuits, such as floristry or photography. With true Japanese practicality, the college has a production department where students get to grips with something that Japan does exceptionally well: manufacturing. Guilbaud says that potential students from overseas are intrigued by Bunka, which is big in Japan but still has a low profile elsewhere. “I always say, if you want to make something classic like they would at Dior, then you should go to one of those other places, like Central Saint Martins. But if you want to learn how to make the things that you want to create, Bunka is the perfect school.” — L
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