In the early 1980s, when Japanese designers such as Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto began to attract significant attention in Paris, fashion journalists frequently interpreted their work through the lens of “Japaneseness.” Monochrome black, silhouettes that obscured the body’s contours, asymmetry, and garments that appeared to wrap the body rather than shape it—these unfamiliar features were often explained using cultural keywords such as “Zen,” “wabi-sabi,” “Bushidō,” and the “kimono.”

At first glance, such interpretations may appear to express respect for Japanese culture. At the same time, however, they reinforced a framework that positioned Japan as an exotic “other.” Rather than focusing on the creativity of individual designers, journalists tended to prioritize a pre-existing image of “Japanese-ness” as the primary explanatory device.

A representative example can be found in fashion journalist Lenore Nicklin’s 1984 article, How Japan captured Paris and Fifth Avenue. In this piece, Nicklin asks Mitsuhiro Matsuda why Japanese fashion had begun to attract such attention. Matsuda offers a clear and rational explanation: Japanese designers responded to a growing demand for loose-fitting garments made of natural fibres. Nevertheless, Nicklin places greater emphasis on the interpreter Randy’s comment that “an understanding of Zen would help,” and further reinforces this reading by citing anthropologist Chie Nakane, who described the Japanese as an irrational people whose thinking is constantly in flux.

Matsuda’s explanation was perfectly coherent as an account of contemporary design trends. Yet Nicklin disregards it, instead redirecting its meaning toward a familiar stereotype of the Japanese as mysterious and non-rational. This act of reinterpretation exemplifies an Orientalist gaze that seeks to culturally fix Japan within an exotic framework.

The widespread acceptance of such interpretations in the 1980s was closely connected to the popularity of nihonjinron, a body of discourse that explains Japanese culture and society by reducing them to a single cultural essence. Chie Nakane’s theory of the “vertical society,” Takeo Doi’s concept of amae, and the large number of books published in the late 1970s addressing the question “What is Japan?” all contributed to portraying the Japanese as inherently group-oriented, harmonious, and closely connected to nature.

Nihonjinron thus functioned as a highly convenient explanatory framework for Western journalists. As Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni (1999) has shown, the kimono was frequently mobilized as a cultural symbol associated with the “Japanese mind,” climate, and bodily sensibility, from which an exoticized image of Japan could be easily derived.

When Rei Kawakubo made her Paris debut in 1981, attention was drawn to elements such as body-wrapping techniques and the use of fabrics associated with rural workwear. These aspects undeniably reflect aspects of Japanese clothing culture. Yet Kawakubo herself consistently resisted being reduced to any fixed cultural essence, expressing a desire to distance her work from essentialist interpretations. Even so, the Western fashion world often demanded readable signs of “Japaneseness,” placing designers in a position where they were compelled to respond to such expectations.

As Naoki Sakai (1989) argues, within a structure where universalism (the West) and particularism (Japan) do not oppose but rather reinforce one another, the more Japanese designers are interpreted as “Japanese,” the more Paris’s position as the universal centre of fashion is stabilized. In this sense, the designation of Japan as “particular” serves to reaffirm the universality of the Western fashion system.

Under these conditions, the success of Japanese designers was often framed as the provision of “exotic difference.” What is reflected here is not so much an evaluation of creative innovation itself, but rather a persistent gaze that positions Japan as a cultural other.

References

Nicklin, Lenore (1984) “How Japan captured Paris and Fifth Avenue,” The Bulletin, 15 May: 58–62.

Goldstein-Gidoni, Ofra (1999) “Kimono and the Construction of Gendered and Cultural Identities,” Ethnology, Vol. 38, No. 4: 351–370.

Sakai, Naoki (1989) “Modernity and its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism,” in Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (eds.), Postmodernism and Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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