World’s First Fundoshi Fashion Show Held In Shibuya (Video)

Posted on November 20, 2017

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This is the future of fashion.

This past October 30, Fundoshibu (Fundoshi Club), an organization dedicated to promoting the use of fundoshi (traditional Japanese underwear), treated a group of more than 200 people in Tokyo’s trendy Shibuya district to something the world had never seen before, a fundoshi fashion show.

The Fundoshibu Team: Dedicated to “changing the world via fundoshi”

Held in the JR Shibuya Station Minami-guchi area at 100BANCH, a location set up by Panasonic in honor of its upcoming 100 year anniversary in 2018 as a way of fostering the ideas and projects of the young people that will play an important role in shaping the next 100 years, the Fundoshi Fashion Festival 2017 (FFF) is the latest and perhaps most ambitious attempt by Fundoshibu to show the world the potential and wonder of what most people nowadays consider a relic of the past: the fundoshi.

The event was funded by supporters via a crowdfunding campaign hosted on the Japanese crowdfunding website Makuake. The campaign was able to raise some 2,000,000 yen (17,854 USD), thus surpassing its set goal of 1,800,000 yen (16,045 USD).

Concept designs of outfits seen at the Fundoshi Fashion Festival 2017 @ 100BANCH

Just like your typical fashion show, the event featured sexy models (both male and female) walking the runway and showing off some very eye-catching outfits. All of the outfits were, of course, centered around the fundoshi. The designs of the outfits were inspired by the following five themes:

Japonism: The most “orthodox” of the five themes. Drawing inspiration from the traditional aspects of Japanese culture that gave birth to the fundoshi in the first place, the designs of these fundoshi are meant to accentuate the attractiveness of the men wearing them and the beauty of the powerful women wearing them. Don’t be fooled though, these aren’t those simple loincloths you might expect to see in an old samurai movie.

Street Mix: Just like the name implies this is fundoshi fashion that draws inspiration from trendy street fashion. This is what people visiting Tokyo in 2020 for the Olympics might expect to see fashionable young people wearing on the streets of Shibuya and Shinjuku.

Luxury Mode: Meant to look like something Western aristocrats would wear if they wore fundoshi. Perfect for wearing in the lounge of a high-class luxury hotel.

Deformed Couture: These fundoshi take the idea of couture – the kind of made-to-order fashionable clothing you might expect to see on wealthy Parisians – and steps it up a notch. With their “deformed” designs these truly one-of-a-kind fundoshi leave people doubting whether what they’re looking at is really a fundoshi or something else entirely.

Futuristic: These “cyber fundoshi” are meant to look like something from the not-so-distant future. If aliens were to arrive on Earth and eliminate Western-style underwear, the people of Earth might end up wearing these kinds of fundoshi.

To check out these high fashion fundoshi outfits, watch the video below.