Chika Kisada Tokyo Fall 2025

Chika Kisada is mad.

The designer, a former ballet dancer who references the dance form in her tulle-accented womenswear, might well be in her Black Swan era. This time she has pirouetted away from the barre and into the nightclub, holding her electric show on a Friday night in an industrial warehouse in Tokyo Bay.

Club music screamed and thumped, the models coming out stomping—really stomping—down the runway, the first one bouncing her puffed up tulle skirt and swinging her little handbag like she was ready to hand out some black eyes. The footwear had dainty pink bows on sheer panels (like ballet flats) that abruptly morphed into leather shoes with flame detailing and square toes. All the better for standing en pointe—or for kicking with.

“I changed the flow a little,” Kisada said backstage afterwards. “I wove in the essence of my own youth culture from the ’90s, so it had this free and unrestrained atmosphere.” She imagined a ballet dancer in the context of a snowy mountain—something that she interpreted as completely contradictory—and so she combined mountain parkas and skiwear into the clothes, with the pink puffer jackets and activewear-spliced tutus making it her sportiest collection yet. “I deliberately left out the tulle dresses this time and put the essence of Chika Kisada into the activewear instead,” she said.

Elsewhere there were deconstructed sheer dresses and skirts with the innards of their patterns exposed through translucent films of tulle, as well as corset-shaped knitwear, and tulle skirts and dresses with padded lumps shoved under their hips. The sharply cut blazers were, as usual, a highlight (Kisada’s secret weapon is her husband and pattern cutter who formerly worked at Comme des Garçons).

The collection also introduced a Barbie collab, with models clutching pink boxes of the world’s most famous doll, or with the plastic figurines hiding in their handbags or styled into their sweaty-looking hair. Unsurprisingly, pink was peppered throughout the collection, on tight lace jumpsuits and minidresses, and on furry knickers. Best of all was the final look: a trench coat with pink tulle bursting out of the backs of its arms like wings. Angel or devil? “You can be anything,” Kisada winked.