Yuka Kimura closed Tokyo Fashion Week’s official schedule this season with a confident sophomore show for her brand Mukcyen (muh-shan).
Kimura cut her teeth in fabric production and graphic design at Yohji Yamamoto, and expectations around her are high. She feels it. Having found success as an influencer before she began the brand in 2023 (@gemmalzr for the curious), she spoke of struggling under the weight of external perception. “The roles given to me from the outside caused me a lot of internal conflict, and I wondered what was the right way to be, or how I should play a certain role,” she said backstage.
She found a comrade in Marie Antoinette, and was particularly fascinated by her interior life and its misrepresentation in history. “As I researched deeper, I realized that although the grandeur of what was happening in that era is completely different from what I experience now, I think we might have shared a similar feeling,” said Kimura. She had also been thinking about Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and the role that Gregor Samsa is famously forced to play when he wakes up as an insect and must still go to work.
The designer did a consummate job of wrangling the rococo romanticism of 1700s France into wearable, buyable clothing: cream velvet hoodies given a V-shape with shoulder pads, stomach-baring lace pirate shirts, and tailored jackets that had been slashed off at the sternum, and were thus transformed into capes. “I’m trying to adapt it to the modern era in my own way,” she said. An all-white look consisting of a corset, cinched over a lace top and worn with floaty bloomers and chunky white heels, was deliciously anachronistic. Towards the middle came a striking duo of looks topped with tall wool caps reminiscent of British bearskins, one worn with a black lace veil and wide tapered wool trousers, like a Bene Gesserit dressed for the streets of Shibuya.
Kimura’s strengths are in fabric and silhouette, clear in the bodycon black gown that pulled in asymmetric folds across the chest, and the white cotton jacquard pants with a rippling texture that was achieved through a shrinking process. The show was well edited and well executed (no Antoinette pun intended), and proved that Mukcyen is worthy of the buzz surrounding her. For those in the industry hunting for some next-gen Tokyo talent, she’s a designer to keep an eye on.
