Madame Junko Shimada

Often referred to as ‘the most Parisian of Japanese designers’, the fashion industry veteran Junko Shimada has been designing from her adopted home of Paris for over 50 years, to the delight of both French and Japanese clients. The result is a refined and unexpected fusion of moods and cultures that is fresh and full of freedom.

lways new, never nostalgic. In fact, fashion designer Junko Shimada does not like nostalgia; she likes her next collection. This attitude manifests throughout the years—a diverse sampling of her extensive archive can be found on her eponymous brand’s website. Looks are always of their time but outside it: fun but not silly, energetic without being trendy, refined without feeling stifled.

Perhaps it is the lighter vibe from her hometown origins in Tateyama, Chiba, Japan, renowned as a popular beach and surf town outside of Tokyo. Or, perhaps it is her senses, forever marked by her maiden arrival to Paris in 1966, at age 25, in an era when French fashion was going through incredible evolutions of attitude, production and style. Nevertheless, Junko Shimada maintains a notion of freedom before all, throughout her many years of creation.

Having graduated from Sugino Gakuen Dressmaker’s College in Japan, upon her arrival in Paris, she began working with the department store Printemps and, later, for the brand Cacharel, before launching her own designs in 1981. She opened her first boutique in the Marais three years later.

Junko Shimada’s extravagant style is more akin to an ultra-refined version of Tokyo street-style than it is to the extremely sober, minimalist looks of Japanese designers who influenced Parisian fashion in early 1990s such as Issey Miyake, Kenzo Takada, Comme des Garçons, and Junya Watanabe. She arrived in Paris before them, and has outlasted them; in fact, her designs were never part of a collective movement; they were always, and still are, distinctively Junko Shimada.

Her style and aesthetic is, arguably, more Parisian than it is typically Japanese, or aimed at deconstructing traditional cultural hegemonies—an element, notably, that seems to please the Japanese consumer, given she has over 20 boutiques in the country. To the French, on the other hand, she is Parisian—but not totally. To both, the conversation happening through design always presents something new.

As the designer is now into her early 80s, the Junko Shimada Spring-Summer 2023 collection expresses a visual and tactile sentiment of purification. All white, full-length linen looks, some in breezy cotton, are layered with airiness and elegance. Or, a full-length nude sequin backless dress, with an integrated hood that falls, just so, upon the shoulders. Unexpected. Elegant, and free. Junko Shimada.