Showroom At the Top

By JAY COCKS

Forget the summit. Let's get down to serious Japanese business here. Not every VIP visiting Tokyo last week was wrangling over the yen and fretting over international terrorism. Anna Maria Craxi, the stylish and ebullient wife of Italy's Prime Minister, was asked through the usual very proper channels what she would like to see during her visit. Kabuki, perhaps? Tea ceremony? A Buddhist temple? Craxi had another idea: an Issey Miyake fashion show. So, snug within the security perimeter of her hotel, Craxi got a close look at some of the world's most beautiful clothes at a presentation narrated by the designer himself.

Too bad she didn't get to town a few weeks earlier. From April 9 through 17, Tokyo played host to its second official season of fashion shows, 33 in all, featuring standout work not only by Miyake and the other two members of the Tokyo triumvirate (Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garons) but by a brace of younger, less familiar talent. Although the so-called Japanese look has got roughed up--even as it has been ripped off--by the fashion establishment, and much of the fashion press tries to write it off and wipe it out, the Tokyo shows demonstrate a true trade surplus of design vitality. Tokyo may not be fully a fashion capital yet, but it is well on its way.

The Tokyo shows were organized by a council of premier designers created by Yohji Yamamoto, Kawakubo, Miyake, Mitsuhiro Matsuda, Kansai Yamamoto and Hanae Mori to wedge the country's talent into the traditional fashion route: Milan, Paris, New York. Paris is still the major market, however, even for Tokyo's finest. "Showing there, from the design point of view, is more intense," Kawakubo says. "It's the first presentation of my new work in front of journalists from all over the world." These, however, are not the best of times for any design that makes demands on the initiative and imagination of the wearer. "It may sound a bit harsh," says Yohji Yamamoto, "but Europe's snobbishness is equal to America's conservatism. To people living in a conservative world, new fashions, new trends and new designs are like something you see in the theater: you clap, but you never live what you see."

Western design professionals recognize that the Japanese have worked changes in the look and line of conventional clothes as radical as anything that has happened in fashion in the past quarter-century. Notes Laura Sinderbrand, director of the design laboratory at New York City's Fashion Institute of Technology: "They were in the forefront of giving us new shapes. They helped us break out of the mold of the set-in sleeve, fitted waistlines, rounded necklines." "Every single fashion designer has copied their skirts, shapes, wraps," comments Alan Bilzerian, who sells a lot of Japanese design in his forward-looking Boston and Worcester, Mass., stores. "They have inspired the entire world and told them to get off their rears." "Their innovations," says Jessica Mitchell, vice president and fashion director for sportswear at Saks Fifth Avenue, "have become part of the language of fashion."

For firm grounding, Tokyo needs young design talent to strike out on new paths off the main road that Miyake and the others are still exploring. Too many of the Tokyo shows were, indeed, numbing attempts to run fancy numbers on mainstream fashion, but there is a group of young designers, like Kensho Abe and Atsuro Tayama, who are coming on strong, and others who have already made an indelible impression. Four off the top:

| TOKIO KUMAGAI, 38, was already celebrated for his elegant, whimsical footwear before he showed his first collection for men just a year ago. He lives in Paris but commutes to Tokyo for four monthlong visits each year. His clothes, which feature sharp lines and muted colors, have a worldliness that combines Eastern ease with Western tailoring. "I have tried to bring different cultures together," he remarks. Kumagai sees contemporary Japan as an imperfect blend of the traditional and the new: "I have tried to mix them the right way. In the '80s, many designers have tried to destroy balance. I wouldn't want to remove the real balance of the human body."

AKIRA ONOZUKA, 35, has spent the past 13 years at the Miyake Design Studio, whence he was recently dispatched to Cannon Mills in North Carolina on a textile project. "I met the president of Cannon, and he looked at me kind of funny," Onozuka remembers. "Then I went into the factory and I saw why. All the workers were dressed like me." Onozuka's Odds On line, now in its first season, shows not only his affection for well-worn American work wear but also a witty and idiosyncratic eye for fabrication and shaping that make his clothes look as funny and funky and comfortable as something a bebop horn player might have worn in the '50s to a gig at Birdland. "I don't love any particular American designer," Onozuka says, "but I love American thrift shops, where you see something all crushed and hung up on a hanger as if someone had just taken it off."

TAKAYUKI MORI, 31, has a more cerebral approach to design. His Tokyo show was a presentation in his elegant shop, where the floor is covered in smooth white pebbles and a fountain bubbles up quietly as if from some deep Zen wellspring. Mannequins were hung with virtuoso variations of dresses and skirts cut from polyester satin and jersey, colored pale red, musky gold and worn white, in a pattern transferred directly from photos of rusted iron. "I'm neither anti-Western nor pro-Eastern," Mori explains. "I'm interested in making clothes that bring out the originality of the individual." His dresses are unemphatic tokens of elegance, breezy bits of hotshot craftsmanship with a certain sophistication of spirit that sets him apart from most of his contemporaries. "I wouldn't want to tell people how to wear clothes," he cautions. "Clothes are like little babies. However they adapt to their environment is fine."

YOSHIKI HISHINUMA, 27, is an anomaly. His clothes, rendered in magisterial folds of fabric and silhouettes that wed high drama to gut-level rock-'n'-roll spirit, appear to Western eyes to be the most formally Japanese. They have the reckless ebullience of decade-old Miyake, and they use the sort of unconventional material (like fishing line) that has been associated with the cutting edge in Tokyo. You can buy them in New York and Chicago, Hong Kong and Kuwait, but, Hishinuma says with some bemusement, they are "avant-garde and not very commercial," so they are not for sale in Japan. "People are afraid of certain outfits," he observes, talking in his one-room studio below a Tokyo back street. "They think, 'This is too loud for me.' " Indeed, the designer is swacked on the vibrant, sun-drenched colors of the Mediterranean and says, "Whenever I go to Italy, it always feels like home." Hishinuma has the kind of unbridled talent that with a little trimming along the far edges, could reright the fashion axis by a couple of degrees.

"I hope," Miyake remarked toward the end of the Tokyo shows, "that my contemporaries and I will be the last to have to go to Paris." With Hishinuma and Onozuka, Kumagai and Takayuki Mori bidding to loom large on the Eastern horizon, it might be wise for everyone to start rearranging travel plans right now.

With reporting by Neil Gross/Tokyo and Elizabeth Rudulph/New York