Another edition of Tokyo Fashion Week has come to an end. I spent six days around Shibuya shooting the 2027 S/S season, and looking back at the pictures now, they seem to hold two cities at once, not the runway and the street, but the same streets under two different lights. Tokyo by day and Tokyo by night, each asking me to photograph it in its own language.
Daytime is cool and unhurried. A woman turns mid-step in a cropped tweed jacket while taxis idle behind her; another stands in a courtyard of green leaves and still water, the city softened to a hush; a third waits on a quiet residential corner where a painted blue wall does the work of a studio backdrop. The palette runs to grey, denim and chlorophyll, and the people are calm and collected, caught in the ordinary business of getting somewhere, dressed with intent.
After dark, everything changes. Buses and neon smear into long ribbons of light; a face dissolves for a moment behind the blur of passing commuters; warm shopfronts and the glow of a food stall replace the daylight blue. This season I felt it more clearly than ever: daytime Tokyo and nighttime Tokyo give me completely different ways of seeing and understanding the city. Under the night signage of a Shibuya bus terminal, my subjects hold still while the city rushes around them, and the frames turn louder, closer, and more charged.
However I shoot, one instinct stays the same: I want to let the city stay in the picture. When I’m working on the street, I like to let whatever is happening around me become part of the frame as I take it. Rather than removing the distractions, I’d rather let the information from the environment flow in naturally. So a bicycle courier cuts across an elegant portrait; a station map, a bus, a stranger’s motion — I keep them; I don’t clear them away.
This season those frames held a wider world, too. More designers came from more countries, and the faces on the street seemed to answer them. Tokyo Fashion Week has always spoken a local language. This year, I heard it spoken with more accents than before.
