Tokyo Creative Salon, an annual festival that runs simultaneously with Fashion Week and Design Week, will be held at multiple venues in the Marunouchi, Nihonbashi, Ginza, Yurakucho, Akasaka, Shibuya, Harajuku, Haneda, Roppongi and Shinjuku districts from March 14 to 24. More than 100 artistic and creative presentations, performances and exhibitions in various forms will take place during this year’s event.

Based on the theme “Co-Creation Festival,” TCS 2024 aims to create a platform that transcends any boundaries and conventional frameworks, facilitating creative connections among people and things to inspire each other.

This is the fifth year since TCS was launched in a bid to make Tokyo the world’s most creative city. Timed to coincide with cherry blossom season, last year more than 820,000 people participated in TCS experiences. This year, TCS is expecting more than 1.5 million.

Runways to frontier of fashion

To mark the beginning of TCS 2024, an opening event will be held at Yoyogi 1st Gymnasium on March 14 in collaboration with Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo. It will consist of runway shows by several brands representing Tokyo, including Akikoaoki, Mikiosakabe and Murral presenting their 2024-25 autumn and winter collections, guidance on how to get the most out of the 10-day event, and a conference on Japanese design and creation as seen from abroad produced by Tokyo Creative Salon General Creative Director Seiichi Saito, director of Panoramatiks and chair of the Good Design Award. Participants at the opening event will be invited to a party afterward to celebrate the launch.

A runway will also be set up in Harajuku as part of Urahara New-Vintage Fes 2024, an event aimed at disseminating new street culture based on “sustainability and diversity” as the key concepts. The streets of Ura-Harajuku, a mecca of street culture, will be decorated with about 60 art flags from March 14 to 24 and the Harajuku end of Cat Street will be made into a runway and flea market venue on March 17. Visitors can enjoy strolling in the area while viewing and shopping for used and vintage clothes, re-created clothes and artworks.

Purchasable creations

There are also other various places and opportunities for shopping and finding unique products and ideas. In the Marunouchi area, the Market for New Adult Marunoichi will be held at Marucube, an open space on the first floor of the Marunouchi Building from March 15 to 17. There will be 10 stores featuring fashion, jewelry and variety goods that are usually sold mainly online. Some of the participating brands are Wonder by Leona, an artist based in Japan who creates one-of-a-kind items from pieces of vintage clothing, and Vu, a sophisticated and contemporary jewelry brand that usually mainly sells its products online.

Ginza is always attractive for those who have a passion for finding high-quality and sophisticated products and services, but it will be especially so from March 15 to 24. Ginza Special Days, a digital stamp rally, will be held and posters and other types of signage with QR codes will appear in various parts of town. Visitors can collect digital stamps by scanning the QR codes with their smartphones, which will enable them to receive various services at participating stores. Participants may also have a chance to win a gift upon successfully collecting certain stamps. More than 100 retailers ranging from old and established stores to new hot spots will take part, making Ginza, the place where tradition, innovation, culture and art coexist, even more exciting.

Art and fashion to see, enjoy

Traditionally, the Nihonbashi area has a rich textile culture with various kinds and sizes of products, such as noren (the short curtains hanging in front of store and restaurant entrances) and furoshiki (wrapping cloths that are used for multiple purposes). In this area, Sakura Textile Park, an artistic installation of textile works, will be set up on the roofed, open-air patio of Coredo Muromachi Terrace from March 15 to 31.

The works exhibited will be Sakura-themed textiles designed by artists Lee Izumida, Masaru Suzuki, Satsuki Mishima, AnChen and Alexis Jamet. The installation will be lit up at night, and a market will be held at the same venue on weekends and holidays, allowing visitors to purchase the textiles and various items made from them.

At TCS Haneda, aspiring designers studying fashion in Japan and the U.K. will show their works under the theme of "This is Japan Denim" at the Haneda Blue Runway 2024 Exhibition. The event will take place in the Marketplace area on the second floor of Haneda Airport’s Terminal 1 from March 15 to 24.

They will showcase items made using material from Kaihara Denim, a major denim producer in Fukuyama, Hiroshima Prefecture, that is well-known for producing some of Japan’s highest-quality denim. The exhibition space will be curated by the Sogetsu School under the supervision of the fourth-generation headmaster Akane Teshigahara.

Additionally, the iconic color representing the Haneda area was created in collaboration with Buaisou, an indigo-dyeing brand from Kamiita-cho, Tokushima Prefecture, and Japan Airport Terminal Co. Buaisou handles everything from cultivating indigo plants to designing and producing clothes. Its pieces will be exhibited at the Flight Deck Tokyo area on the fifth floor of Terminal 2.

Various exhibitions will also take place in Shibuya Ward. One of them is a series of collaborations by fashion brand Yuima Nakazato and Spiber, a biotech startup based in Yamagata Prefecture that is developing, designing and producing innovative protein materials named Brewed Protein, which is made from plant-based resources using cutting-edge synthetic biology, polymer and materials sciences.

Combining craftsmanship and technology, Nakazato seeks to address social issues while pursuing cutting-edge fashion through his collections at Haute Couture Week. Right in the center of Shibuya, the birthplace of many fashion trends, the project poses a fundamental question: “What is sustainability?”

The main exhibition will be held in Shibuya Station’s east underground area from March 17 to 24. Installations of various sizes and media, including video and multidimensional presentations, will be placed in and around the station. They are linked to the Yuima Nakazato brand’s first solo exhibition “Beyond Couture” (“Au-dela de la couture”) to be held in Calais, France, from June.

At Scene12 on the 12th floor of Shibuya Scramble Square, a “new fashion x music” event featuring a DJ and discussions will be held on March 23. A video specifically created for this event by director and filmmaker Spikey John will be shown as well.

In the Akasaka area, a performance composed of ballet and fashion, “La Fete,” will take place at TBS Akasaka Blitz Studio on March 24. The collaboration between the K-Ballet Tokyo led by celebrated dancer Tetsuya Kuma and Tomo Koizumi, a fashion brand attracting worldwide attention, made it possible to create a gorgeous stage of dancers with overwhelming physical ability and colorful and dynamic costumes.

Many more events will be happening concurrently in Yurakucho, Roppongi and Shinjuku at venues such as Yurakucho Mullion, Nihonbashi Takashimaya, Tokyo Midtown and Shinjuku Takashimaya, in addition to the seven previously mentioned areas between March 14 and 24.