Kidill SS26
Paris was its usual restless, impatient self as the crowd swelled outside the Kidill SS26 show. The heat had already taken its toll, I noticed one woman who seemed to surrender to it altogether. Stepping out of her Uber in nothing more than stockings and lingerie. And yet, as I watched her stride past us with a kind of defiant insouciance, I couldn’t help but think, isn’t this precisely the sort of unfiltered authenticity that belongs here? Fashion always demands audacity, and today, Paris greeted us with it before the runway even began.
Once the security gates parted, guests streamed through a lush garden terrace, iced tea and artisanal chocolates waiting like quiet consolations before the chaos. The moment felt intentional, and as Hiroaki Sueyasu’s world soon unfurled before us, that juxtaposition became everything. Serenity slipping into riotous imagination, courtesy of Kidill.
Kidill has always been about disruption. Bold, unapologetic, and vocal in its refusal to conform. This season was no exception, but it carried with it a new tension, one that leaned deeply into Japan’s cultural memory. If AW25 sat with introspection, then SS26 exploded outward, shifting vision from Harajuku’s eccentric streets to the gleaming circuits of Akihabara. Sueyasu has long been fascinated by the inner universes of Japan’s otaku culture. The very imaginations once dismissed at the edges of society, now reframed as vibrant, undeniable forces shaping the mainstream. In his own words, these worlds “wove together fragments of reality, exaggerated them and spun new microcosmic narratives.” SS26 captured that boundless exaggeration and thrust it onto the runway with exhilarating intensity.
Silhouettes referenced Godzilla’s scaled skins, their jagged beauty echoed in exaggerated textures. Rubberized finishes evoked the tactility of figurines, their plastic gloss reclaimed as luxury. Accessories doubled as art pieces. Body armor was made in collaboration with CTCTYO. And perhaps the show’s most memorable accessory, the armored nekomimi ear unit, a sculptural nod to cosplay, fantasy, and transformation. Sueyasu invited wearers not just to dress up, but to become “figurized,” recasting themselves as living avatars.
Layered into this spectacle was a rare collaboration with Tatsunoko Production, the anime studio behind cult classics Science Ninja Team Gatchaman and Mach GoGoGo. Their imagery crackled across select garments, fusing nostalgia with futurism. For those who once grew up clutching toys under fluorescent Akihabara shop lights, seeing these icons revived in the couture context was undeniably powerful.
What often defines Kidill is its simultaneous embrace of punk ferocity and delicate subversion. That duality was palpable here, cybernetic armor sat beside lush florals; kawaii sweetness hardened into grotesque, jagged edges. Chaos lingered in harmony with restraint. Sueyasu knows how to hold contradiction without dissolving it, and that is precisely why Kidill never blurs into homogeneity.
Even the staging testified to this balance.
As the last model disappeared and the crowd burst alive again, I kept circling back to one thought, Kidill’s power lives not in its loudness, but in its refusal to dilute its edges. Sueyasu has crafted a space where punk collides with anime nostalgia, where figurines spring to life, and where the psychological barriers of marginal subculture are not only broken but honored as creative lineages. SS26 isn’t just fashion. It is cultural memory rethreaded and made tactile, blurring where rebellion ends and imagination begins.
KIDILL website
