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Japanese fashion is known for being avant-garde and innovative, but when it comes to oozing sex appeal? Not so much.
For womenswear designer Emi Funayama, 37, the lack of body-conscious clothing for Japanese women to delight in was a point of dissatisfaction. “I felt like most of the clothes in Japan stood out more than the person wearing them,” she says at her showroom a couple of days after the AW24 runway show for her brand Fetico, which has since filled that niche with verve.
“I started out wanting to create something that I would really want to wear myself,” she says. At 150cm tall, Funayama struggled to find grown-up looking clothing that erred on the side of sexy, rather than cute. “I had a sense that even though there are very few designers in the Japanese market who create clothes with women’s bodies in mind, there is a customer base who wants it,” she says. “Once I started to understand that there were patterns that I could draw from that would flatter the body, the ball started rolling.”
Funayama is calm and self-assured, with a warm voice, a sleek black bob and manicured hands decorated with gold and silver rings. The name Fetico comes from a nickname Funayama was given by her peers while in fashion school at ESMOD in Tokyo (the word basically translates to “fetish kid”). With her sensual, lingerie-adjacent designs and smaller stature, it was a good fit. Graduating from ESMOD Tokyo in 2009, she worked as a patternmaker at Hysteric Glamor for three years before refining her skills further as the womenswear designer for Christian Dada for five more.
Funayama founded Fetico in 2020 with a small nest egg. “I started out just making samples for about 2 million yen (approx £10,000), with just my savings,” she says. For the first few months, she took on odd jobs as a costume maker for ‘idols’ and TV stars in order to make ends meet, but the business got off the ground quickly. “From the second season onwards, I was able to do it full-time,” she says. As of 2024, Fetico’s annual revenue now sits in the low seven figures (in GBP terms).
The USP of Fetico’s clothes are that they are sexy without giving too much away; black dresses might be high-necked but sheer around the chest, or denim miniskirts may have slashes in the sides to show a wink of bare thigh as the wearer struts down the street. Rather than the “naked dressing” trend currently gripping the West, Funayama’s approach feels fresh. “The trend on red carpets in the West is to show more and more skin, but Fetico does the opposite,” says the actress Tao Okamoto, who sat front row at the brand’s AW24 show last week. Okamoto noted the subtle cross-shaped cut-outs on the front of otherwise demure dresses and the detailed tweaks that Funayama makes to her garments that make them feel sensual but wearable. “It’s sophisticated yet sexy, in a very elegant way,” she tells me.
A challenge to grow abroad
Fetico does 90 per cent of its sales through wholesale, and the rest through DTC on its website, which it outsources. Wholesale growth has been impressive, increasing by 197 per cent YoY from AW22 to AW23, and by 160 per cent from SS23 to SS24. Not including Funayama herself, Fetico currently employs six members of staff, two of which are full-time.
In the current season the brand has 40 wholesale stockists, with 38 of them across Japan, one in South Korea, and another, Curve, a boutique in West Hollywood. That the majority of Fetico’s stockists are in Japan means the brand has more oversight of who buys and how they merchandise the product, but the team are keen to strengthen their play beyond the domestic market. “We receive quite a few offers [in Japan], but we turn some of them down. Sales growth is already very good in the Japanese market, so we want to focus more on overseas wholesalers,” says Nahoko Kubara, Fetico’s director of sales.
Expansion abroad, especially outside of Asia, is easier said than done. Fetico fills a niche in the Japanese market, but multiple rounds of showrooms during Paris Fashion Week have so far yielded little in the way of results from Western buyers. “Increasing our brand awareness overseas is one of the main challenges,” says Kubara. Another is the design: the clothes are a natural fit in the Japanese market, but there are fears that the aesthetic doesn’t translate to the Western market. “[Western buyers] sometimes think there’s a bit too much detail,” says Kubara, adding that more minimal styles like jackets and trousers generally yield a more positive response.
Runway appeal
Fetico’s runway shows, which have become a highlight of the Tokyo Fashion Week calendar, have been key in raising brand awareness domestically. “Once I started doing shows, things really picked up. As an advertisement, having shows is definitely effective,” says Funayama. The cost of putting on a show, however, is considerable. Fetico’s runway shows are slick productions; the most recent one cost around 13 million yen (approx £68,000), and holding them twice a year is a challenge. “We spend slightly more money on the shows than we do on making samples,” says Funayama.
The brand’s PR agency, The Wall, also has a high-end boutique called Adelaide in Tokyo’s Aoyama district, which stocks Fetico and leverages its relationships with celebrity clients to invite them to shows or lends them clothes to wear on TV or on the red carpet. “We are not doing any gifting at this stage, but if someone comes to our showroom and orders multiple pieces, then we might give them one item,” says Funayama, adding that she may do more gifting or seeding in the future. Funayama currently handles Fetico’s Instagram completely by herself, with no specific strategy. “I’m not very active on social media, but I try to limit the amount of posts on my account and only post really strong photos,” she says.
Funayama has another secret weapon: her husband. A prolific stylist in Japan and internationally, Shotaro Yamaguchi handles Fetico’s visuals, styles the brand’s shows, and acts as a de facto creative director. “We’ll often bounce ideas around, or he’ll give me advice about the balance of colour. He’s both my husband and my brand consultant,” she laughs.
The full vision, however, is all Funayama’s own. “My goal is just to create clothes that women can genuinely enjoy wearing,” she says. “It’s really about finding ways to feel good about your body.”
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