Yushokobayashi Tokyo Spring 2027

What is the cost of going mainstream? Of being known? For Yusho Kobayashi, whose darkly sugary brand of kawaii fashion is very much part of the Tokyo underground, it’s a question he’s been considering lately. After winning the Tokyo Fashion Award last year, a couple of collaborations with Comme des Garçons, and heavy-hitting celebrity endorsements (including Elle Fanning and K-Pop girl group ILLIT), he’s found himself wrenched from the depths of Tokyo subculture and into the limelight.

This season he’d been thinking about The Little Mermaid, and related with the metaphor of looking up towards the surface. This wasn’t a Disneyfied “Part of Your World” expression, but one that in typical Yusho fashion drew on the original story’s darker themes: the pain of walking on one’s feet in an unfamiliar world, the realization that the sea water running down the mermaid’s cheeks was really tears, and maybe the hint of regret at making a choice that can no longer be reversed.

The show unfolded on a charmingly DIY set: cardboard cutouts of turtles and sunken Ionic columns, discarded disco balls, and squares of carpet littered around; two great sheets of sheer fabric flanked the runway to give a—quite convincing—underwater effect. Instead of show notes, we were given a set of coloring pencils along with a child’s dot-to-dot drawing game and crossword. An invitation to retreat into childhood?

Local musician N-FENI provided a live soundtrack with her guitar, riffing away as the lights rippled over the scene. When the models came out, they clambered amid the flotsam, wearing frilly dresses decorated with complications of lace, strings of pearls and net-like knits that looked as though they had been washed up on the shore. One carried a giant cardboard prawn.

“We wanted to create something ‘crafty’, intricate, fun, and cute by using a variety of materials, almost like an arts-and-crafts project,” Kobayashi said afterwards. Though the naivety of the set made it feel like we were watching a particularly abstract school play, there’s a clear power and magnetism, evidenced by the strong and diverse crowd that turned out for tonight’s show—many of them wearing his clothes.

“Our brand concept is about transcending age and gender. We want our clothes to be worn by anyone who embraces girly aesthetics and holds onto that initial feeling of finding something kawaii,” he said. “It makes me really happy to have people like that wear my clothes.” With the surface of the water now cleared, the sky’s the limit.

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