TOKYO — A virtual fashion museum owned by one of Japan’s most influential vintage stores is venturing into the physical realm with a new exhibit.

The exhibition features groundbreaking looks from a variety of Japanese and international designers, spanning the 1970s through to the 2000s.

The brainchild of buyer and curator Hideo Hashiura of the vintage store Laila, La Museum opened as a virtual fashion archive in July 2024. It staged a small, one-day exhibit at a forest villa in Nagano prefecture in May, thanks to a proposal by the well-known architect Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA, which designed the striking building. The museum’s latest exhibit is its first to last multiple days and to tell a visual story of a particular period in fashion history.

La Museum Shibuya opens Saturday for a two-week period in the basement of a nondescript office building just steps from one of Tokyo’s most bustling neighborhoods. The building’s demolition is scheduled to begin at the end of the month, and so Hashiura and his team were given free reign over the space.

“We have been running the virtual museum for almost a year and have done a couple of exhibits on the history of fashion design,” Hashiura said. “But to really understand the detail and the design, the most important thing is to be able to see the clothes up close, as well as at eye level. If you’re looking up at the clothes, you miss the full picture.”

The Shibuya exhibit by La Museum is broken into five sections. Each has its own theme, but all of the mannequins are arranged at floor level, with visitors invited to move between and among them, providing a unique opportunity to see looks from all angles and just inches away. But still, Hashiura’s dream is to bring people even closer to these archival looks.

The exhibition catalogue. Courtesy photo.

“I would love to do an exhibit with 1,000 mannequins all lined up in long rows, and with 50 fitting rooms also in a row, and to invite people to actually try on the clothes. It’s a fine line, because clothing is fragile and easily damaged by the oil on our fingers, perspiration and just general use, but also fashion is a product. It’s not art — it’s meant to be worn,” Hashiura said.

La Museum’s collection consists of about 7,000 pieces, all of which are by designers and brands that Hashiura and his team source for the Laila stores. The first Laila location opened in 2002, and it quickly became an arbiter of Japanese vintage culture for its rare, hard-to-find runway pieces.

The exhibit at La Museum Shibuya features around 50 looks from La Museum’s online exhibit “1950s-2010s Part 2 History of Modern Fashion Design,” which opened in March and continues to run concurrently. Pieces from Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons, Kenzo and Kansai Yamamoto are displayed alongside designs by Alexander McQueen, Helmut Lang, John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood. Another section focuses on the Antwerp Six designers, while a Martin Margiela trench coat with a long tail stands before a photo installation by Maison Martin Margiela, which was only shown once before, at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2006.

On another wall in the space are projected images by photographer and editor Shoichi Aoki, known for his work on the Japanese street-style magazines Street, Fruits and Tune. Screened from an old-school slide projector, the photos were captured in Paris on Oct. 19, 1989, documenting the runway and surrounding scenes of the Maison Martin Margiela spring 1990 collection. Next to this are seven mannequins dressed in looks from the same collection, using the same styling that was shown on the runway.

A look by Maison Martin Margiela next to a wall of street-style photos. Courtesy photo.

Hashiura said despite the time and effort required to install and then uninstall a physical exhibition such as this one, he hopes to do others in the future if the opportunity arises. He continues to build La Museum’s collection — he recently purchased about 20 pieces from Kerry Taylor Auctions in New York—and wants to share this with the public as much as possible.

La Museum Shibuya runs from Saturday until June 29 in Tokyo, and is open to the public free of charge.