Tokyo Creative Salon: Crosstown Fashion & Design Fair Promoting Tokyo as a World-Leading Creative City

TOKYO, JAPAN, March 31, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ -- For the sixth springtime in a row, Tokyo has turned into a city-wide showground, blessed by cherry blossoms.

Tokyo Creative Salon — an annual celebration of ingenuity in fashion, design and various other fields of art and craft — unfolded across 10 iconic districts of the vibrant Japanese capital from March 13 to 23 this year. Tradition and sustainability were in focus again.

As ubiquitous as ever, this event led by companies and communities carried on the mission of establishing Tokyo as a world-leading creative city.

Street runways. Showcases for traditional craftmanship and sustainable upcycling. Proving grounds for creative ideas. They were among the over 120 pieces of content (fashion shows, exhibitions, installations, workshops, talk sessions, pop-up stores, performances, etc.) lined up for the sixth edition of Tokyo Creative Salon, or TCS 2025 for short.

The event has come to be known as one of Japan’s largest creative festivals. But Hirouchi Takeshi, Chairman of the Tokyo Creative Salon Executive Committee, believes it’s not enough.

Japanese creators need to engage themselves in “co-creation” with the rest of the world, he said, as they lack confidence in Tokyo’s global reputation as a creative city. “Therefore, we aim to make the strengths of Japan’s creativity, particularly traditional arts and crafts, available to the world, and stimulate co-creation between these techniques and the world’s designers and brands.”

“Shoulder to shoulder with Paris and Milan”
For its part, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government has organized a “Sustainable Fashion Design Award” and another competition for up-and-coming designers for three years running in a tie-up with TCS. The sustainability-linked prize is contested by aspiring Tokyo-based amateur designers who reuse kimono fabrics for their works.

“Japan has already produced a host of fashion designers who made names for themselves around the world. We are continuing this project to definitely support their potential successors,” said Tokyo Governor Koike Yuriko. “We want to develop this into an event that will lead Tokyo to stand shoulder to shoulder with Paris, Milan and others as fashion hubs. ”

Diverse in content and form, this year’s Tokyo Creative Salon attractions included:
- A “Suit Walk” in which dozens of office workers in their favorite suits strutted through the central business district of Marunouchi. They have staged five similar parades since 2023 to promote the men’s formal wear.

- A 40-meter red carpet for a “Street Energy” fashion and art show in Harajuku, the birthplace of street-born trends and the global kawaii (cuteness) craze. Rain forced the show indoors, but the beat went on with kabuki actor Nakamura Hashigo dancing with a giant sake cup. This might quickly call to mind Coco Chanel (1883-1971) who famously said: “A fashion that does not reach the streets is not a fashion.”

- Local fashion school students doing a catwalk in a park under early cherry blossoms in bustling Shinjuku. They recycled used clothes and modeled them. Many of them study at century-old Bunka Fashion College whose alumni include couturiers Takada Kenzo and Yamamoto Yohji.

In a fashion show on March 29, the Tokyo Governor’s Prizes — the top prizes of 2025 Sustainable Fashion Design Award — went to a colorful quilting down coat made from various kimono fabrics (Wear Category) and a pair of sneakers based on fabrics from kimono robes and sashes (Fashion Goods Category). “This is a moment when talents bloom together with the full cherry blossoms, ” Governor Koike said a message read at the awarding ceremony as a popular cherry variety was about to come into full bloom in the city.

In parallel to TCS, the metropolitan government has also supported fashion businesses with subsidies to host events promoting their industry with a focus on “regional characteristics .”

An estimated 1.5 million people flocked through the 10 TCS festival areas: Marunouchi, Nihonbashi, Ginza, Yurakucho, Akasaka, Roppongi, Shibuya, Harajuku, Shinjuku and Haneda. Either traditional or trendy, or both, they are located not so far from each other in the center of the megacity of 14 million, except for the waterfront airport of Haneda.

Most of the festival’s content, including participatory and interactive experiences for visitors, were seamlessly woven into the townscape of each district and its ongoing cultural and commercial activities such as the Shibuya Fashion Week and the Marunouchi Spring Collection.

To help the visitor explore the labyrinth of TCS 2025, a “Tokyo QUEST Gacha” machine was placed at major sites to provide Gacha capsules containing tidbits on another festival area.

Milan is “our model”
“We look up to Milano Salone as our model,” Executive Committee chairman Hirouchi noted, referring to the six-decade-old world’s top design fair primarily focused on furniture. ”We are aiming to make ordinary people at large feel closer to fashion and design, not leaving it as the preserve of a limited few.”

When TCS was launched in 2020, Hirouchi, a men’s clothing magnate who headed the Japan Apparel Fashion Industry Council from 2009 to 2018, declared the event was aimed at cementing Tokyo’s position among the world’s top fashion capitals alongside Paris, Milan, New York and London.

Having grown in size and stature, the event involved some 100 giant retailers, real estate developers and other private companies, as well as public entities, industry organizations and local communities this year.

“The festival’s ambition is, very clearly, not just to stage an event but to reinforce Tokyo’s identity as a dynamic creative organism,” writes Swedish arts and culture freelancer Erik Augustin Palm in the Japan Times. He describes Tokyo as a “place where historical legacies, contemporary experiments and future innovations intertwine, not merely as displays but as lived experiences.”

Cherry blossoms: One of the main themes
TCS has been held every March because the month falls in the middle of the “cherry blossom season that is expected to attract many inbound tourists,” said the Executive Committee’s secretariat. “We place cherry blossoms as one of our main themes.”

Indeed, an artwork resembling a blossomed cherry tree was on display at a luxury hotel lobby outside the Imperial Palace. Titled the “Flower of Beginning,” it was made from discarded flowers that were pressed into traditional Tosa washi paper.

At a Noh play theater in Ginza, the top-brand destination for shopping, wining and dining, Noh actor Kanze Saburota, 25, danced for half an hour along the theme of a classic fable about townspeople visiting a remote mountain covered with cherry blossoms and encountering celestial beings.

In neighboring Nihonbashi, a town of traditional craftsmanship dating to the Edo period (1603-1868), about 50 carp-shaped Koinobori streamers were hung together in an atrium inside a high-rise emporium. They were based on the traditional art of dyeing textiles. Koinobori has been customarily hoisted to wish for the health of children in Japan.

Old hand-stitching technique “Sashiko,” deadstock clothes brought back to life
The business district of Marunouchi also offered the old hand-stitching and mending technique of Sashiko, which was applied to sneakers, and “Live Stock Market”, which pooled deadstock brand goods reinvented by stylist Ozawa Hiroshi. A unit of craftswomen, named “Sashiko Gals” and based in the earthquake-struck northeastern Japan region, presented sneakers and other items. They have Hollywood heartthrob Justin Timberlake among their fast growing clientile.

In the fashion-conscious youth town of Shibuya, famous for its all-direction “Scramble Crossing,” TCS 2025 merged into the 23rd running of the semiannual Shibuya Fashion Week. The local event featured huge installations, striking murals and dynamic performances at the cultural complex Bunkamura. Large commercial facilities and street stores alike provided shopping experiences during the event adorned with designs by the popular Naijel Graph studio.

Akasaka, known as a midtown area for social gatherings of sophisticated adults, recreated its festive past by staging traditional parades of giant floats and fully dressed local geisha entertainers.

Roppongi, an upmarket neighborhood where celebrities and all sorts of night people like to gather and party, paid tribute to Noto, a rugged Sea of Japan peninsula, which was devastated by a massive earthquake and rainstorms last year. About 200 time-honored materials, utensils, tools and antiques salvaged from destroyed old homes were exhibited for sale.

In the main terminal of Haneda Airport, 3D-print stools in the shape of clouds were available to travelers. Made of 100 percent renewable materials, the chairs could change shape. This “Sitting in the Sky” installation was one of the TCS creations which, a PR handout says, were presented “with dreams and hopes on board from Haneda where people and cultures from around the world cross paths.”

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