Like many Tokyo designers this season, Chika Kisada is forgoing a runway show to focus more on sales and her showrooms, while also producing a lookbook.
Kisada’s calling card is taking ballet—though she’s been doing balletcore long before it blew up on TikTok—and inoculating it with a shot of punk. This season was titled Dehors. “In ballet, it’s a fundamental concept about opening up one’s joints and cultivating a specific physical sensation,” she said during a walkthrough. “For me, it was really about expressing a sense of liberation.”
Take corsets, for instance. Usually intended to constrict the body and squish one’s soft tissues into an hourglass shape, Kisada reinterprets them in a way she finds freeing. The corset in the opening look featured adjustable lacing—“almost like an apron”—intending to flatter the form and improve the posture like a normal corset, but still feel comfortable and easy. The kind of thing you could, technically, throw on over some jeans.
These ballet inflections went the other way, too: a second-skin top flared and frilled at the hem like a tutu skirt, while the bottom of a pink lace blouse extended into the gusset of a bodysuit that was layered over a long skirt sliced up to the thigh. A denim garter belt hung over a pair of jeans, and a bomber jacket (one of Kisada’s staples) had tulle bursting from the arms.
The footwear—loafers and satin pumps pierced with clusters of silver rings on the vamp—was designed to evoke the punishing pain of dancing en pointe. “The inside of a pointe shoe is actually quite grotesque and the foot is subjected to extreme stress, so I wanted to express that contrast through body-piercing elements, creating something elegant on the outside while hinting at the mystery, or the horror and chaos happening inside the shoe.”
She lightened everything up with rainbow-colored beads and tiny ribbons that drew on childhood nostalgia. “I wanted to steer things toward a more joyful, happy, and sensory experience, so the challenge was figuring out how to translate those playful elements into something elegant,” she said.
