In this FRONTPAGE story, we visit the Tokyo workshop of Mikio Sakabe, a figure in Japanese fashion whose disciples agree is a father to them all.
It’s a warm spring day in Tokyo, and the cherry blossoms that have begun to fall are now swirling around the city like a blizzard of confetti. Mikio Sakabe is in his studio on the second floor of a small building in the trendy Tomigaya district, flanked by rails of his designs that shield us from the sunlight, and swigging from a bottle of Tully’s Coffee.
He could do with the caffeine. Sakabe, 47, is a central figure in Tokyo’s vibrant fashion scene, with plenty on his plate: he’s a fashion designer with multiple brands as well as an educator and the founder of his own fashion school. Sakabe is known as one of the biggest supporters of young talent in the country.
Tall, broad, and almost always dressed in a black blazer, T-shirt, and track pants, Sakabe’s default expression is impassive; he would look intimidating were it not for a boyish grin, which he deploys easily and often. “He’s a big friendly bear,” one of his students tells me.
Sakabe may be one the city’s most intriguing fashion names, but he didn’t set out to become “a fashion guy” at all. Born in Nerima, a district in north Tokyo, Sakabe originally studied mathematics at Seikei University. It was in London, where he’d gone to do an art foundation course at Central Saint Martins, that a tutor suggested he’d do well in fashion. “I liked clothes, and wearing Raf Simons and Walter [van Beirendonck] when I was a student, but I had never considered being a designer,” he says. Still, he took his tutor’s advice, spending two years at The École supérieure des arts et techniques de la mode (ESMOD) in Paris, then attending the Hogeschool in Antwerp. In 2006, and alongside his wife, the Taiwanese designer Shueh Jen-Fang (who would later launch her own label, Jenny Fax) he started his own brand. After showing at Paris Fashion Week the following year they returned to Tokyo, where they’re still based.
Though it might not have the international clout of Paris, Tokyo makes for a fertile environment for fashion creatives to thrive, he tells me. “It’s a little bit easier to start a brand here, because brands can find their community or market in Japan or China or Korea more easily.” And why is that? “People like to be fashionable, especially in Tokyo,” he says. The city’s superior fashion sense is well-known, and the refined outfits on display on the city streets, and in particular in Shibuya, on any given day make London and Paris look, well, a bit dead. “I feel curious – why they don’t wear good clothes in Europe?” he asks sincerely. “It’s the center of fashion there, but you look at them in the street and: no good clothes!”
Sakabe wakes up around 9:00 am every day and makes the rounds at his three nearby offices for a series of meetings. “In a second, it becomes night. It’s always so quick,” he says. On any given week he might be in Indonesia or China visiting factories, shooting in Denmark, holding a showroom in Paris, or teaching a class in Shibuya. In the flashes of free time he can nab, Sakabe watches Japanese horror movies; his favorite is the notoriously terrifying Ju-On. “After seeing a really scary horror movie, there’s this feeling that the world changes, you feel something shift in the room,” he says. “That is the entrance to fantasy for me.”
His clothes could be described similarly — as an “entrance to a fantasy world through real life.” They toe the line between fun, childish frippery and grown-up seriousness; a metallic-blush puff-sleeve dress in one look and a power-shouldered black suit in another. Then there’s his footwear line, Grounds, whose distinctive cloud-like soles make it look as though the wearer has stepped in a bubble of ectoplasm.
Perhaps Sakabe’s most important products aren’t the ones he sells, but the real people he champions. As a teacher, he is a driving force behind the next generation of Japanese fashion talent. After working as a tutor at Yoshikazu Yamagata’s revolutionary school Coconogacco, the designer founded his own institution: the “me school”. Now in its fourth year, the school exists to train would-be fashion designers and help prepare them for the reality of the profession – not just as creatives but as serious businesspeople. “We help the designers find their originality, and then after they graduate we try to introduce them to people and support them,” says Sakabe. Its first wave of graduates are just now beginning to establish themselves.
Alongside the school, Sakabe founded the Three Treasures group, an initiative that supports young brands by connecting them with investors, manufacturers, and wholesalers to get them off the ground and turn their creative dreams into viable self-sufficient businesses. “I think now is a real possibility, more than when I started my brand, for people from Japan to become global designers,” he says “That’s why I really want to help them.”
The Tokyo Fashion Week schedule is now populated by talent that Sakabe has mentored: Keisuke Yoshida and Akiko Aoki are both prominent young designers who run eponymous labels, and Tetsuya Doi, a graduate of Me School, recently founded the brand Re:qual. “They were my students, and now they are helping me as teachers. It’s like a cycle,” says Sakabe. I tell him this makes him something like the dad of Tokyo fashion. “I am,” he smiles like a tired but proud parent, and takes another sip of coffee. “It makes me very busy.”
A few weeks after our conversation, Sakabe held a show for his FW23 collection in the expansive halls of Yodobashi Church in Shinjuku, whose ridged concrete ceiling features a void in the shape of a crucifix. The night of the show, blue trash bags that Sakabe had constructed into a mountain towered over the runway. Models came out from behind the garbage mountain wearing metallic babydoll dresses and slouchy, oversized tailoring, their shoulders caked in a thick layer of dust as though they’d been standing still for decades. Eventually, the dusty jackets made way for gold and silver dresses that peeked through the tailoring as if to hint at light bursting from within.
By Tokyo’s standards, the show drew a huge (and hugely diverse) crowd. Everyone from industry denizens to fashion students gathered outside, a clamoring crowd clad in Grounds sneakers. Skulking a few meters away, a lone figure dressed in black watched on from afar, giving a nod now and again to the few people that spotted him. Later, I asked Sakabe backstage what he’d been doing out there, but he just smiled. “He’s too curious!” laughed Jen-Fang from his side. “He just wants to see who’s coming.”
The designer explained that his collection was all about hikikomori, Japan’s phenomenon of recluses who have withdrawn from society and don’t leave the house, hence all that trash and accumulated dust. “The concept was those shut-ins trying to go out for the first time,” he says. Sakabe is a self-proclaimed pessimist, but recently he’s found himself seeking out more positives through his work. He adds: “Even after you can give up on so many things, you can still find hope.” For Asia’s young designers, Sakabe is a beacon of it.
