If anyone ever tells you that it’s too late to switch your career path, cancel them. It’s never too late to pursue your passions. Designer Arashi Yanagawa proves that full commitment is the only permission you need, and you only require it from yourself.
The start of Arashi’s career looked very different from what it is today. With beginnings in boxing, Arashi pursued his father’s former passion as a professional boxer. “My father wanted me to be a boxer, so I had to do boxing. I didn’t want to stay myself, but I had a boxing skill. Boxing suits me as a sport.”
“I won many times. I got a national champion three times. Now, I couldn’t just stop boxing. Then last match, I lost as a professional boxer, I got fighting money, and went to London with the fight money. Then went to the market and bought a biker jacket. I fell in love with clothes, and wanted to start making clothes”
The intensity, drive, and hard work that professional boxing requires, Arashi puts into each of his designs and collections. The AW26 collection, in particular, reflects this sports background in a fashionable way. Long coats, tailored, bomber, and biker jackets show exaggerated, forward-leaning sleeves, not only as an aesthetic choice but also mirroring structures seen in military garments and simulating postures seen in a boxing match.
“I was interested in fashion when I was young, but my father was a boxer.”
Arashi started by designing clothes for friends in the industry, learning the design process through trial and error. Often the designer also derived inspiration from music, politics, or art, finding himself in museums where exploring the same themes in his collections.
At Berlin Fashion Week 26, the show opened with distorted sounds from an electric guitar, echoing against the walls of the industrial mid-city venue. Models strut down the runway with intention, dressed in black, white, silver, and camo. Each color reminds of a different natural inspiration of the collection: black recalling Nordic nights, white snow, silver ice, autumn and winter camo prints, all working together to create John Lawrence Sullivan’s Autumn/Winter collection.
At the root of the brand, John Lawrence Sullivan designs show strength, power, edge, and attitude.
“I want each of my clothes, all my clothes, to have attitude. For example, a very chic, simple white jacket, but with strong attitude.”
