The Making of Tomo Koizumi’s NYFW Debut
Tomo Koizumi BTS
By now you’ve seen the videos of Gwendoline Christie swanning down the grand staircase in Marc Jacobs’s Madison Avenue store wearing a rainbow confection by Tomo Koizumi. Christie kicks out each leg to avoid tripping on her flared, angel-pink pants. Her left hand, wrapped up in orange and red fabric like a carnation, glides across the railing. With black platform shoes on, she is something like 8 feet tall. Lou Reed is playing on the sound system and a call of Brits is hooting and hollering for their friend’s first runway turn in New York.
It was one of those pinch-me fashion moments. And it almost never happened.
Just four weeks ago, Tomo Koizumi was at his home in Tokyo, working as a costume designer for entertainers in Japan. He had a mere 2,000 Instagram followers. He had dressed Japanese pop stars, and Lady Gaga on one of her mid-teens trips to his home country. And then Koizumi got a message out of the blue from Katie Grand. A screenshot of that text message is now the background on his phone.
Grand had caught wind of Koizumi from Giles Deacon, who had reposted a couple of the designer’s dresses on his Instagram account. She started to follow Koizumi and then “he started posting some bigger pieces about four weeks ago, so then I texted him and said, ‘Can we do a show?’ ” she said several days before Koizumi’s NYFW debut. She set him up in Marc Jacobs’s studio on Spring Street, cordoning off a section for his fanciful frocks and wrangling the best in the business to help make Koizumi’s show a sensation. Guido Palau did the hair. Pat McGrath did the makeup. Jin Soon, the nails. Rowan Blanchard, Karen Elson, Bella Hadid, Joan Smalls, Primrose Archer, and more walked the runway. “It’s a crazy story, but I suppose you get to the point where you’ve done loads of stuff and you’ve worked with loads of people and it’s nice to kind of help people when you can because they’re good,” says Grand.
“I didn’t expect anything like this,” Koizumi says, as a friend steams out the wrinkles from one of his bulbous dresses. Each piece is made from Japanese polyester organza—better than tulle, he says, because it holds color better. Koizumi uses over 400 colors of Japanese organza, making the ruffles first and then machine sewing the ruffles together to create a garment. The average piece, he estimates, uses somewhere between 50 and 80 meters of fabric. The biggest uses 200 meters. “For me, it’s like ruffle armor for girls,” he says. “I grew up watching Sailor Moon and this kind of magical girl is one of my big inspirations.”
But Koizumi is not a one-note designer. He pulls out an inspiration book with images of Cristóbal Balenciaga dresses; Leigh Bowery; Buddhist statues; tiny, oddly proportioned Japanese dolls; Japanese flower sculpture; and hanawa, a kind of plastic funerary wreath with floral designs. Koizumi’s pieces might look fluffy and sweet, but there are layers and layers of technique and spirit in each one. His biggest reference is John Galliano. “I was 14 when I found a picture of Galliano’s Dior. It was like 2004, 2005. I was really shocked because I was raised in the countryside—in Chiba just next to Tokyo, but it’s really the countryside. It changed my life. I decided I wanted to be someone who could give that feeling to people.”
Koizumi is not trained as a fashion designer, nor does he work with a big team of patternmakers and assistants. He has one assistant that works with him in Japan; when he needs help he recruits students from Tokyo’s Bunka Fashion College. Having visited New York just once before, he jumped at Grand’s offer for a show. He just rolled up his frocks into three cardboard boxes, each one maybe a two-foot cube, and shipped them across the globe. Because the dresses are polyester, they can be crushed up small only to blossom into fairy-tale proportions. They can also, Koizumi says, be machine-washed—though he’s never tried it.
Up on Madison Avenue, the production went off without a hitch. Editors stood in the mirrored basement floor of the store, some late arrivals crowding at the entrance. “In my head it was kind of that thing of, if you’re available on Friday at 6 and you want to see something, come,” says Grand. “And if you miss it, the pictures will be phenomenal I think.” The pictures are phenomenal, but you had to be there to hear the raucous hoorah at the finale and watch photographers and editors rush the staircase, where models had posed, to get a closer look. Koizumi sprinted down the stairs beaming. “It’s like more than my dream,” he said. “It’s really bigger than dreams.”
