“Mirror to Mirage” - Omotesando Street Fashion Museum

Fashion, quite often is about the tension between showing and hiding. Tokyo is a city full of encounters and events. We are interested in making fashion physical in such a city – the building itself is switchable – transmitting live events from all over the city. The tower itself switches between showing and hiding, like the constant changes of fashion; or metaphorically, between mirrors that reflects reality in its glittering surface and a mirage of reflected desire in someone else’s space.

For centuries individuals have used clothes as a form of nonverbal communication to indicate social status. Fashion is considered as a mirror on the society with constant cultural changes.  The current age of global cities is marked by new social relations brought by advancing technologies and economic systems. Under such environment, we’re showing more and more things about ourselves to the outside world everyday, which makes quite a transparency and immediacy. Today fashion as a global phenomenon is accessible to and affordable for everyone.

The tower concept starts with the idea of the dispersion of perception in our society now. It compels fashion by means of architecture – through a museum that questions and explores the relationship between fashion and the city that surrounds it.

Dispersed, fragmented and instantly repeated. In this new urban experience fashion is not only drove by economic prosperity, but also fueled with the tension of city living: it’s hiding here and showing somewhere else…The Tokyo fashion museum will integrate fashion with the entire city, or, engage the whole city with fashion. It reflects the urban mirage that dispersed into events happening on the streets, in the stations, on top of the buildings; spaces that can observe, move, perform and transform.

The dispersion of perception also runs though the tower. Exhibition rooms are interlocked with one another, there are no fixed horizontal lines – spaces are distorted; boundaries between imagination and reality are blurred, everything reflects or shines and nothing is truly transparent…