Tag: featured

After graduating from GFC, Zhu Yi remained in Japan to further her research into the world of Japanese fashion. She pursued her PhD under the guidance of Professor Takagi Yoko, and just last week, she successfully completed her doctoral dissertation and public presentation. Her research offers a fascinating deep dive into theories in Japanese fashion.

Japanese fashion is often explained through Western theories and a small set of designers whose work fits familiar ideas such as “deconstruction,” “blackness,” or “Zen.” This presentation asks what gets overlooked when those categories become the default way to define “Japaneseness.” Since the 1990s, Japanese fashion has also developed through Ura-Harajuku street culture, globally circulating everyday apparel (exemplified by UNIQLO), and place-based practices rooted in regional materials and craft techniques. These trajectories are widely discussed in Japanese-language scholarship, yet they remain comparatively underrepresented or difficult to theorize in English-language fashion studies.　

　To address this gap, the research proposes three Japanese aesthetic concepts as analytical lenses: mitate, mingei, and superflat. Rather than treating them as fixed traditions or brand slogans, the presentation uses them as tools to examine how meaning and value are produced in fashion, and how styles and narratives circulate across media, institutions, and markets.
　Mitate clarifies design as reframing: garments generate meaning by citation, substitution, and re-contextualization, inviting viewers to “see one thing as another.” Mingei foregrounds everyday beauty and collective making, enabling analysis of value beyond luxury through use, repetition, anonymity, and affordability. Superflat, with its strong international afterlife, provides a framework for tracing how Japanese fashion travels through images, collaborations, and remixing across art, pop culture, and commerce.

　The presentation combines a critical review of key institutional histories in fashion studies and exhibition culture with case studies that span avant-garde, designer, everyday, and streetwear contexts: ISSEY MIYAKE, YOHJI YAMAMOTO, COMME des GARÇONS, matohu, UNIQLO, 20471120, UNDERCOVER, and A BATHING APE®. Reading these diverse examples through mitate, mingei, and superflat highlights forms of creativity and cultural circulation that Western frameworks often sideline. It also reframes Japonisme not as a one- way influence from Japan to the West, but as a multidirectional, cyclical process of reception, re-editing, and re-circulation in today’s global fashion culture

In Japan, the end of the academic year is drawing closer, and our MA2 students have been working towards the completion of their theses and projects for the past months. As part of their project, our MA2 student, Abe Lee, organised a screening event for the documentary that they developed discussing the theme of non-binary fashion expression in Japan titled “Fashioning Ambiguity: Japanese Nonbinary Style.” The event was held at Black Bird Eatery, a queer-friendly space in Sasazuka, and was filled with a large crowd for the occasion.

In their documentary, Abe discusses the results of the research they have conducted over the past two years. The documentary explores the experiences and style of nonbinary and x-gender people in Japan, through interviews with various participants including the co-founder of non-binary magazine IWAKAN, Andromeda, and some leading scholars in the field.

Abe made the documentary publicly available, and it can be viewed on their homepage.

We had the pleasure of welcoming Professor Gareth Kershaw from RMIT University, who delivered a special lecture and hands-on workshop for GFC students on object-based research into occupational and functional garments, using men’s technical archetypes as a pedagogical tool.

In his talk, Professor Kershaw emphasized the growing importance of revisiting and reinterpreting occupational clothing in contemporary design—both to enhance functionality and to elevate aesthetic value.

Drawing on examples ranging from Andrew Bolton’s concept of “Supermodern” clothing to the innovative work of Massimo Osti of C.P. Company, he explained how exploring diverse design methodologies and historical approaches can broaden our perspectives as fashion designers.

During the workshop, students engaged in archive-based research—an approach Professor Kershaw has developed extensively over the years—and worked directly with the pattern of the Swiss Army M70 Alpenflage Jacket, gaining insight into the construction and logic behind technical garments.

On January 7th, Laure Julien, who did her double degree at our GFC course in 2020, visited the university to talk about her multiple professional experiences as an independent artist after her time at our course.

During her exchange at GFC, Laure decided to extend her time in Japan for one year, to intern with the brand Eatable of many orders (Atami, Japan), between 2021 and 2022, and apprentice with bamboo master Tanaka Kyokusho in 2022. While in Atami, she also participated in an artist-in-residence program that allowed her to develop and present a performance project with a butoh dancer dressed in silk and bamboo, inspired by the princess Kaguya. After her time in Japan, she returned to Paris to finish her education at ENSAD, where she developed a graduate collection of sculptures in bamboo and leather in 2023.

After graduation, she has been active as an independent artist, and participated in a residence project at Casa de Velázquez, Madrid, Spain, to study esparto weaving in 2024, and continued studying palm, bull rush, and soft rush weaving in Portugal during the same year. While participating in these apprenticeships and residence programs, she organised and participated in multiple exhibitions featuring her works in France, Spain, and Japan.

She returned to Japan in January of this year with a cultural activity visa, to participate in two artist-in-residence programs: a MIRA artist in residence program in Beppu, Kyushu, where she will be working with bamboo artist Takayuki Shimizu; and a residency at YUI-PORT in Niigata.

Her experiences provided a valuable inspiration for our current students, and showed that even with limited Japanese language skills, it is possible to participate in internships, apprenticeships and artist-in-residency programs in Japan! We wish Laure all the best of luck in her upcoming endeavors!