Last year, Arashi Yanagawa made his Berlin debut through the “Berlin Contemporary” funding program. This season, he returns to an audience that has clearly embraced his work. The shift in mood is just as apparent: less metalhead, more sleek. For spring 2027, the Japanese designer—who founded his label in 2003—turned to androgyny. Like many designers blurring gendered conventions, Yanagawa began with traditionally masculine silhouettes, using his precise tailoring as the collection’s foundation. That starting point felt especially resonant given his previous career as a professional boxer, a discipline still steeped in ideals of masculinity.
Inspired by Modern Lovers (1990), photographer Bettina Rheims’s portrait series exploring the performance and plurality of gender identities, Yanagawa subtly disrupted his signature tailoring—blazers and suits cut long or cropped—with conventionally feminine gestures: lace peeking from sleeves, mesh tulle, crushed velvet, glossy patent finishes, and shorts designed to resemble skirts. Altercasting completed the picture with models that looked lifted straight from Rheims’s photographs, slicked-back hair included.
Yanagawa translated the ease of Rheims’s portraits directly onto the runway. Rather than overturning familiar archetypes, he shifted them just enough. A beige blouson with a peplum briefly flirted with feminine codes before razor-sharp trousers pull the look back into masculine territory. Even the black boots concealed their slender heels until the wearer started walking. “I wanted to explore the space between masculinity and femininity. For example, we created men’s shoes with a softly rounded toe and slender heels that remain almost invisible at first glance. You only really notice them as the exaggerated flare of the trousers shifts and reveals them while walking,” Yanagawa explained after the show.
Not every look was quite so restrained. A double-breasted blazer layered over a python-print shirt was wrapped with straps that cinched the waist, crossed the chest, and disappeared into the jacket. The motif reappeared on several shirts, framing a classically tied necktie. For Yanagawa, it was deeply personal: “The art of shibari is part of my culture. In Japanese, the word has a double meaning. It refers both to binding with rope and to restriction or constraint—or, in my work, to the structural constraints inherent in tailoring.”
Fetishistic undertones—Yanagawa also cited Nancy Grossman’s bondage drawings as a reference—surfaced in leather waist corsets that visually extended voluminous leather trousers upward, as well as in body-hugging lace tops worn by the female models. It’s evident that, despite incorporating womenswear into his practice in 2010, Yanagawa’s greatest strength—and the clear focus of this season—remains menswear. It’s that unwavering sense of integrity that makes Yanagawa’s presence such a welcome one at Berlin Fashion Week.
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