Women’s revolution, stitched by fashion
Print Edition
BORN out of a drive to make Western-style clothing accessible, Tokyo’s Bunka Fashion College unleashed a sartorial and social revolution among Japanese women after it opened nearly a century ago.
And while its current 21-storey concrete structure in the heart of Tokyo’s business district doesn’t scream high-fashion, it is the place to be for anyone aspiring to work in Japan’s design industry.
Dressed in head-turning outfits, Bunka students — young, confident and largely female — make no attempt to blend in with the hordes of suited salarymen marching to work.
“We are used to standing out,” said 21-year-old Erika Yoshino, towering over passers-by in platform shoes.
“If you spot someone fashionable around here you just know they are from Bunka,” she saidat the end of a long night working on her final-year collection.
Japanese fashion is now associated with cutting-edge designers — and Bunka graduates — like Yohji Yamamoto and Kenzo Takada.
But when Isaburo Namiki founded the country’s first dressmaking school in 1923, the traditional kimono still dominated women’s wardrobes.
“Western-style clothing for women wasn’t very easy to find and even when you could find dresses, they didn’t necessarily fit Japanese bodies well,” said Samuel Thomas, lecturer at Bunka Gakuen University, the graduate school associated with the college.
In the beginning, most applicants were looking for alternatives to the complicated, layered kimono and simply wanted to learn how to make clothes for themselves.
“Bunka offered these women a chance to access the modernity represented by western clothing,” Thomas said.
“The change in how the body was presented — from being wrapped in layers in a kimono to the mobility offered by a dress — allowed women to redefine themselves,” he said.
Buoyed by Bunka’s success, dressmaking schools sprouted up across Japan.
Fumi Yamamoto, a young war World War II widow and single mother opened a dressmaking shop in Tokyo after graduating from Bunka.
With Western-style clothing no longer a novelty, Bunka students were eager to experiment and soon, another fashion revolution was on the way with a new generation eager to make the transition from dressmaker to designer.
After Kenzo Takada made his debut in New York in 1970, Hiroko Koshino followed up his success by becoming the first Japanese designer to show in Rome in 1978.
Junko Koshino debuted her collection in Paris the same year while youngest sibling Michiko’s trendsetting label, Michiko London, became a hit on the clubbing circuit in 1980s Britain.
Decades later, the sisters and Hiroko’s daughter, Yuma, all run their own labels, responsible for businesses that span the globe — a rarity in Japan’s male-dominated society.
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