Column 009｜モデルという仕事は、もうなくした方がいい——さようなら、僕の青春｜Goodbye to My Youth: A Former Runway Model Welcomes AI
Opening — A farewell to the world I belonged to AI is replacing models. As a former model, I did not hear that and think someone was stealing my youth. I thought tha
Opening — A farewell to the world I belonged to
AI is replacing models. As a former model, I did not hear that and think someone was stealing my youth. I thought that perhaps I could finally say goodbye.
Reuters reports on synthetic people and contracts for replicating real models’ faces and bodies.[1] But production costs and job numbers are not my only questions. What was a runway meant to create? Whom have we been calling models? If those words have been hollowed out, what do we preserve merely by insisting that a human must stand there?
This is not an outsider laughing at fashion. It is a farewell letter from someone who worked inside it, built a brand and modeled professionally.
1 | A collection runway is not a trade exhibition
What is a collection?
A house presents the coming season—S/S or A/W—before it arrives. The runway is a place where a designer expresses an imagined future through clothing, silhouette, cutting and styling.
The runway is a place for anticipating the near future. Among exceptionally gifted designers, it is not unusual for collection themes to converge. That convergence can give rise to the season’s trend.
I do not extend this aesthetic automatically to manufacturers presenting everyday clothes, or something close to them. Even with prêt-à-porter, if the purpose is simply to advertise what will reach the shop floor, a trade exhibition is enough. Many apparel companies and emerging designers use precisely that format.
A collection runway is not a trade-exhibition stage.
I am not saying clothes must not sell. I am saying that explaining a product for sale and presenting a world we have never seen are different acts.
This is a criticism I particularly direct at the stages extending from the old Tokyo Collection to Tokyo fashion week and today’s Rakuten Fashion Week TOKYO.
What I understood as its founding ambition was to develop collections in Tokyo capable of attracting overseas buyers and fashion editors. Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake are inseparable from that ambition in my mind. The institutional record identifies six founders of the CFD in 1985.[2]
Gradually, however, I felt it was contaminated by the familiar crowd who make their living out of looking as though they “work in fashion!”
My objection is not about whether there is a selection process for the official calendar. It is how an organizer treats someone trying to make clothes and present a world.
In the Paris I knew, calendar selection was distinct from judging the collection or clothes themselves in order to intervene in expression. There could even be support such as providing security guards free of charge.
In the Tokyo I experienced, clothes and a house’s commercial scale were judged. I also encountered situations that made me feel connections mattered. Who had the door opened for them, and why? I could not see the standard.
Supporting a stage for expression is different from sorting its participants by commercial scale and connections.
That is my point. Published institutional conditions are addressed separately in the notes.[3][4]
First-time applicants are asked to submit a designer profile and brand materials that include the brand concept and product photographs. What they hand over is more than a preferred date: it is the creator’s background and creative expression itself.
If you make young talent submit their profiles and work, then you, the judges, must also show us your own discernment and the grounds for your decisions. Only the creators are tested; the selectors are not. I do not call that one-way arrangement nurturing talent.
Here is another episode I want to recount.
As far as I knew, that brand’s clothes were not sold anywhere in Japan.
How do I know that?
An acquaintance at a boutique told me directly that the designer himself had come to pitch his work and had been brushed off and sent away. This was the boutique of the very person who had discovered the late Alexander McQueen, who had also been a friend of mine. To me, it was a brazen, shameless thing to do. Yet, despite all that, it seemed to me that the designer and his company had gained admission simply because he was the son of a celebrated yūzen textile artist. To my knowledge, they still participate, for some reason presenting kimono and yukata collections.
I was not in the meeting that decided admission. “Simply because he was the son” is my critical reading of what I saw, not knowledge of the committee’s reasoning. But I will not erase the incongruity I felt.
2 | The ¥100,000 T-shirts sold. The door still did not open
Allow me a personal digression.
I will leave the name out, but at the time I ran a brand with my closest friend. Through stylists, we supplied clothes mainly to hugely popular singers and artists whose names anyone would still recognize today. We understood ourselves as a mode label, not merely an apparel business.
Sales were substantial. We made small quantities deliberately, yet ¥100,000 T-shirts flew out.
Still, we were never able to participate in Tokyo Collection. Nor, of course, were we ever invited.
I remember reading an industry-newspaper article in Senken Shimbun in which someone calling himself a producer said, in substance, that he strongly advised participating young designers to make things that sell.
I am recounting my memory of the article, not presenting a verbatim quotation from a clipping I have in front of me.
It ran directly against the philosophy I saw in European and American collections. I remember laughing in disbelief with my house’s colleagues. It was laughable.
A collection runway is not a trade exhibition.
If the instruction was “sell,” our clothes were selling. What, beyond that, were they judging? Whom were they choosing? What angered me as a young man was the pretense of acting “for young designers” while those questions remained unanswered.
This was the old history of what I am tempted to call a slave system, known to those inside fashion before the internet made backstage realities widely visible.
As far as I know, Tokyo Collection’s founding ambition of bringing European and American fashion editors and buyers to Japan remains unfulfilled even today.
And Issey Miyake, one of the founders, has passed away; Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto have both left Tokyo Collection of their own accord.
3 | What is being shown beneath the “collection” sign?
Then there are real-clothes events such as Kobe Collection and Tokyo Girls Collection.
Their histories must be distinguished. Kobe Collection’s Tokyo edition became Tokyo Runway in 2012; TGC is a separate event that began in 2005.[5][6]
That distinction does not change my criticism. Glossy apparel companies targeting young women come together to show new products. Putting the grand word “collection” over that commercial event does not make it the stage for creation I seek.
To my eyes, these were collections in name only: worthless events. If a place meant to show the future through clothes offers chiefly products and publicity around performers, what is the runway for? Stages grouped under the word “collection” headed in a direction utterly different from what I mean by it.
To my eyes, they became less collections than parades of performers unable to make it in their other media. This matters to the central subject of this essay: models.
A collection runway is neither a trade exhibition nor an event for watching unsuccessful celebrities and hostess-club women.
That is my aesthetic judgment, not a researched classification of every performer’s earnings or biography. But I do not intend to hide my contempt for what I saw beneath polite language.
An aside: Japan also has an organization called the Japan Fashion Color Association.
“Some fucking old man nobody knows announcing, ‘This year’s fashionable color is…!’”—that was how the culture looked to me. What an absurd position from which to speak.
JAFCA actually selects colors through expert committees, research and international information; it is not a system in which one elderly man decides everything.[7] What I dislike is the atmosphere in which a forecast or proposal becomes an apparent command to everyone’s sensibility.
I also encountered industry talk of grading designers like architects—first class, second class.
Who grades talent? And who grades the graders?
4 | Factories disappeared beyond the MD’s budget
Another development I cannot overlook was the authority I encountered under the title MD.
Ordinarily, MD means merchandiser, a role concerned with merchandise policy and planning. What follows is not a definition of everyone in that occupation. It is an account of power exercised under that title in the apparel workplaces I knew.
They acted as though they could unilaterally determine what outsourced patternmakers and sewing factories would be paid. As the industry’s decline steepened, those figures appeared before me like corporate-hired sōkaiya: the shareholder-meeting racketeer as a metaphor for coercive power, not an allegation of a criminal affiliation.
They prioritized their own profits and budgets. Beyond those decisions, sewing factories employing superb technicians—craft Japan had reason to be proud of—were driven toward closure. I witnessed that reality.
I do not intend to explain every factory closure through a single occupation. But I will never forget what I saw in those workplaces: the paying side’s priorities driving the people who actually made things into a corner. And I will never forgive it.
Young people hoping to launch brands should know this. So should young people hoping to become fashion models on the world stage.
5 | Calling yourself a model and doing a model’s work
Today, anyone can call themselves a model. You only need to look at social-media biographies.
In the world where I worked, however, we recognized distinct professional fields:
- Performing in fashion shows.
- Working as the subject of magazines and photographic media.
- Performing in television commercials and moving images.
I called people models when they made one or more of these their profession. Most had a principal field.
I was taught in the industry that a supermodel could work in all three fields to the same high standard. It was not simply about good looks or the fame of a particular job.
I am not confusing that professional teaching with a worldwide certification. “Supermodel” is also commonly used for a highly successful, famous model.[8] I am describing the understanding I inherited.
And models, in fact, have no freedom.
You walk as the director tells you, or as a renowned runway-walking instructor taught you. You do not invent an expression or strike a pose on a whim. You must assert nothing.
A doll. A moving mannequin.
Yet something worthy of becoming part of the collection’s world must be drawn out of you.
Erasing yourself is not the same as becoming interchangeable. Even while following instructions, something can emerge that only that body could bring. The work I knew lived inside that contradiction.
Here we enter a territory that models who have appeared in shows at the Paris collections and elsewhere—including me, TokyoBrainie—know through the body.
If I liken it to Thelema around Aleister Crowley, who was associated with the Golden Dawn, and Rose Crowley, I mean an inward experience inaccessible to an outside glance. It is a metaphor, not a historical claim about doctrine or membership.
6 | I think AI would be better
Especially in an age of declining births, I imagine it is immensely difficult to find models possessing both that talent and that beauty.
Birth rates alone do not explain global talent supply. The difficulty of finding what I seek is nevertheless real to me.
For campaign photographs, using celebrities can also make branding and marketing clearer.
I feel the range of people and countries seeking luxury brands has broadened: countries once described as “backward,” and markets where religious or cultural circumstances meant conventional Western advertising would not necessarily be accepted unchanged.
I find it hard to believe that models appealing to fashion-conscious people in those markets must remain the traditionally white-centered cast. Of course nationality or skin color does not determine an individual’s taste. That is precisely why I question the idea of one face representing everyone.
I welcome this Reuters article, and I think AI would be better than models.
That does not mean taking a real person’s face or body without permission. Inventing a fictional person is different from detaching someone’s body from their own wishes. What I welcome is an expanded choice of creative means.
7 | “I usually work as a model!”
Recently, at an investment event, an event companion—a promotional hostess—introduced herself to me.
“I usually work as a model!”
“Oh, really? Which modeling agency?”
Looking down, she answered:
“I’m freelance.”
I said nothing and walked away.
A freelance model.
The phrase is everywhere now. In my professional understanding, however, a genuinely freelance model was someone with so much work that an agency was unnecessary—someone near the top of the modeling hierarchy.
A princess never works as an event companion.
That is the gulf between the meaning I gave the word and its use before me, not a verified assessment of her entire work history. The idea of counting companion work as a step toward modeling was incompatible with the professional world I knew.
Agency affiliation also affects access to opportunities. The glamour of saying “freelance” is different from being able to secure work, negotiate terms and protect your body.
8 | From the runway to investing — Seeing a future and pricing it
Writing this, I found a connection between the collections I once worked in and the investing I now study.
Reading a future that has not yet taken shape, and choosing here and now: in that sense, designers and investors share something.
But a designer does more than predict. By presenting clothes, a designer tries to create the very future people will desire. Investors who supply capital can participate in making a future happen, too.
My first thought was that models were individual stocks, and designers the sectors themselves. A world takes shape under one designer, pointing in a particular direction, with selected bodies placed within it. That intuition still makes sense to me.
A more precise comparison, however, would make the designer a portfolio manager with a distinctive investment philosophy.
The vision of the coming era is the investment philosophy; the collection is the portfolio that gives it concrete form. Combinations of looks and models correspond to individual holdings and their weights. Changes in materials, technology and ways of living that run across several houses are closer to sectors or investment themes.
Yet treating the model alone as a stock loses the relationship between body and clothing. That is why I wrote that erasing yourself is not the same as becoming interchangeable.
Collecting excellent things does not automatically produce an excellent composition. What matters is what you combine them with and what you ask each to carry.
There is also a crucial difference. An innovative collection can matter as expression even if it does not sell. In investing, a correct reading of the future can still lose money if the purchase price or timing of cash returns is wrong. Conviction about the future does not resolve the question of price.
The eye that sees a future and the eye that puts a price on it are similar, but they are not the same. I learned the former on the runway. I am now learning the latter in the market.
Ending | Goodbye to my youth
Modeling is indeed the work of becoming material for a world that does not exist.
But if it is already so full of emptiness, then as a former model I wholeheartedly welcome AI creating something with substance that belongs in that imagined world.
Being human does not automatically make something authentic. Making a title look convincing and making a work’s world exist are different things.
What I want to preserve is not the chair once occupied by my younger self. It is the substance of making worlds.
The profession of modeling should disappear.
Goodbye to my youth.
That would be best.
