5 Shows We Can’t Get Out of Our Heads From Tokyo Fashion Week FW26
From VIVIANO to Mikio Sakabe.
Tokyo is one of the most exhilarating places in the world, so it’s only natural that its fashion week—officially known as Rakuten Fashion Week TOKYO—does more than keep pace with the Big Four; it carves out a lane entirely its own. That was especially clear at the just-wrapped Fall/Winter 2026 edition, a milestone season marking the showcase’s 20th anniversary. The intoxicating megalopolis celebrated with a lineup of shows that felt less like traditional runways and more like immersive, high-fashion fever dreams.
Outside the venues, the city’s fashion die-hards turned sidewalks and Tokyo Metro platforms into unofficial catwalks, serving up hyper-stylized looks that rivaled what was happening inside. On the runways, designers delivered everything from high-glam, star-making moments to full-on theatrical presentations that blurred the line between fashion and performance.
From celebrity favorite VIVIANO’s church-set spectacle and Mikio Sakabe’s haunted house to the FernGully-meets-Harajuku world of yushokobayashi, the week made one thing clear: if you want to know what the cool kids will be wearing next season, it’s already happening in Tokyo.
Read on for the standout shows we can’t get out of our jet-lagged brains.
VIVIANO
Viviano Sue’s VIVIANO is having a massive year. The ever-bold and beautiful brand has officially graduated to the global stage: earlier this month, Bad Bunny wore a VIVIANO FW26 embroidered vest and frill shirt while performing at his first-ever concert in Japan for the Spotify Billions Club. Lady Gaga has also been storming the stage in the label’s signature ruffles on multiple stops of her “Mayhem” tour, and Heated Rivalry‘s Hudson Williams recently showed up to a pre-Oscars party in a full VIVIANO look. Naturally, all eyes were on VIVIANO this season to see what Sue had up his lacy, sheer sleeve next. The designer didn’t just deliver with his collection, titled “Portrait of Her, Unnamed,” he took us to church. Literally.
A high-glam crowd of editors and celebrities, including beauty icon Zutti Mattia and Netflix’s The Boyfriend fan favorite Usak, packed into Yodobashi Church, perched on the corner of the buzzing Okubo-dori in Shin-Okubo, Tokyo’s Koreatown. Beneath a starburst-patterned concrete ceiling drenched in deep, cinematic red light, the space felt more like a brutalist nightclub than a place of worship, set to a spine-rattling soundtrack replete with moody church organ notes. Models emerged from the red-lit haze and drifted down the elevated catwalk like voluminous, high-fashion ghosts with teased, slightly feral Grace Coddington-style hair.
The collection landed somewhere between punk prom, Studio 54 glamour, and a gothy, Corpse Bride romanticism—exactly the kind of tension found in Sue’s career-long brand concept: “Chaos in shimmer through the veil of order.” The looks were purely visceral, from a colossal, shaggy tan faux fur coat (made by weaving wool onto mesh to mimic the depth of real fur, without harming animals) that practically swallowed the runway, to a skeletal, multi-tiered black tulle skirt that felt more like a dark architectural feat than a garment.
The show also marked the brand’s 10th anniversary, with Sue reflecting on the journey: “Over the past ten years, many people have told me what I should do, but I never listened. And after a decade, that chaos has become my signature. With this collection, I hope to send this message: don’t let others define you, just be yourself.” Mission majorly accomplished. It was a sensational, star-making show for one of Tokyo’s most unapologetically glamorous forces.
Yueqi Qi
You can usually tell what you’re about to walk into before a show even starts. That was especially the case outside Yueqi Qi’s FW26 show at Jiyu Gakuen Myonichikan, a 1921 Frank Lloyd Wright-designed former school tucked along a sleepy Ikebukuro backstreet, where a swarm of street-style photographers snapped away at Tokyo’s best-dressed cool kids. Inside the tranquil, chapel-like space, a beyond-hip front row packed the wooden benches (sunglasses on, phones out, a handful of Ginger Spice-red heads in the mix) as models stomped across the creaky floors in a Lisa Frank-on-acid fever dream of mismatched, hyper-femme looks, including a few après-ski—but make it kawaii—numbers and punky pastel pieces that work for both Easter Sunday and the dancefloor.
The Guangzhou-based designer has built a cult following in Japan, and for “ROSA,” she channeled the kaleidoscopic, high-saturation vibe of a now-defunct underground shopping arcade in Niigata. On the runway, this came through in her signature laser-cut lace layered across slips, corsetry and deconstructed knits, alongside distorted florals, folklore-inspired patterns, and pixel-art black cats that looked as if they were pulled from a lo-fi ’90s computer screen.
Lingerie slips, babydoll dresses and school-uniform references read as Baby Spice- and early L.A.M.B.-era Gwen Stefani-coded. The styling pushed the unhinged spirit further: star-shaped, It Girl-friendly bags, fuzzy leg warmers, floral-embroidered tights, and trippy jewels dangling from eyes and noses, which, according to the show notes, were a playful nod to anime-style tears and snot. Every look was fully bonkers from head to toe, including a Timberland collab that reworked the classic with Qi’s signature laser-cut lace detailing and 3D floral beadwork, giving off early-aughts rhinestone-tattoo vibes. Just as scene-stealing was the collab with cult Tokyo-based label GROUNDS, whose fur-lined, bubble-soled ski boots came in minty teal and powder pink. Fearless footwear for the Tokyo girlies who treat the sidewalk like a candy-colored runway.
Mikio Sakabe
Mikio Sakabe didn’t just stage a show; he dropped us straight into a full-blown domestic nightmare and delivered goosebumps-inducing glamour. After removing their shoes at the doorway, designer-clad guests tiptoed through a rickety, traditional 90-year-old wooden house in Shiba, Minato-ku (used as an escape room for horror fans and reportedly haunted), where the presentation, titled “Forgotten,” played like The Shining meets The Ring.
Inside, the two-story house echoed with menacing, high-tension slasher-flick music as guests moved cautiously through 11 shadowy rooms staged with models frozen in eerie poses or muttering to themselves. In a messy kitchen, a fashion victim—wig, plastic hand and all—lay sprawled beneath a heap of clothes, one leg sticking out like a dark fashion-week version of the Wicked Witch. Instead of a ruby slipper, she wore a glossy, jet-black bubble-soled shoe by GROUNDS, where Sakabe serves as creative director. Elsewhere, a model in red lipstick and a razor-sharp bob with bangs swallowing her eyes circled aimlessly behind strips of yellow caution tape, somewhere between beauty editorial and total psychological collapse.
My favorite part was the trio of models rendered faceless by raven-black pigtails, dressed in warped school-uniform riffs and set against stark, clinical white curtains like a psych ward straight out of Girl, Interrupted. The creepy-chic collection carried that same tension into doll-like frills, sailor-style pullovers, heart-patterned coats and outlandishly exaggerated shoulder pads, paired with red lipstick and insanely perfect bobs that felt ripped from a haunted nursery.
Those chunky GROUNDS shoes, already a staple among Tokyo’s coolest, hit even harder, stomping through a literal murder house. Guests wandered the groaning hallways, equal parts intrigued and visibly unsettled, before being called into a final, suffocatingly small room, where the door slammed, my heart nearly stopped, and dizzying surveillance footage revealed a murderer prowling through the house. As the figure raised an axe and moved toward the camera, the screen cut to black, then the door burst open behind it, revealing Sakabe himself, who greeted guests, took questions, cited The Exorcist as a favorite and said his goal was to “make something strange and creepy, not just scary.”
On the way out, everyone was gifted teddy bear keychains whose singed, sooty fur made them feel like they’d barely survived the house themselves. Stepping back into the sunlight of the quiet residential block, Charli xcx’s “I Think I’m Gonna Die In This House” was the only thing playing in my head.
YUSHOKOBAYASHI
Inside Shibuya Hikarie, a glassy skyscraper perched above the iconic chaos of the Shibuya Crossing and its flickering billboards, Yusho Kobayashi built a trippy, makeshift forest for his FW26 show, “VOID.” Looking at the runway felt like stepping into a FernGully-meets-Harajuku fever dream, with paper flowers scattered across the floor and fabric hanging overhead like a craft project gone rogue. The Central Saint Martins–trained designer, who launched yushokobayashi in 2019, went all in on a wacky, whimsical and gloomy vision with huge Little Bo Peep–ish bows, rough patchworked pieces, frilly layers, and childlike, hand-drawn illustrations in Sakura pink, with crumpled, paper-like dresses adding a paper-doll edge, all styled in a grungy and off-kilter way.
The hats, created in collaboration with KIJIMA TAKAYUKI, were especially zany, from floppy, extra-droopy bonnets to exaggerated shapes that felt part costume, part DIY experiment. One oversized ribbon headpiece, which Kobayashi described in the show notes as a “Death Ribbon,” came from his idea of creating “something cute yet fragile.” Japanese artist Yoyou performed a chilled-out, moody and synth-y live performance, leaning against a tree as models passed by. The thrillingly delirious collection felt very Cabbage Patch Kids meets Etsy-core. In other words, if you’re into clean lines and quiet luxury, this is not the brand for you.
SEIVSON
Tzu Chin Shen’s Seivson served up one of the week’s most unapologetically sexy lineups, doubling down on the brand’s signature skin-baring attitude with a sharper, more in-your-face, punk edge. Presented at Shibuya Hikarie under the theme “In Motion, In Balance,” the Taiwan-based label sent out a parade of midriff-baring looks, low-slung leather trousers, slinky sheer skirts and barely-there layers that clung and slipped, revealing just enough.
Torn knits, lace panels, and spliced fabrics kept things raw and a little rough around the edges, while the palette stayed tight and moody, heavy on inky black, oxblood, and deep red, with flashes of shine from slick leather and sharp accessories. It had that effortless It Girl, crazy sexy cool energy. We could easily see Emily Ratajkowski or Julia Fox on a coffee run in one of those shredded, midriff-baring looks, tapping into a kind of Brat-era attitude without trying too hard. Someone get Addison Rae on the phone, because these are stage-ready looks that demand a spotlight.
