“(UN)KNOWN HIROKO KOSHINO” is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo in Kiyosumi-Shirakawa, running from May 26 through July 26, 2026.

The name Hiroko Koshino is already deeply embedded in the history of Japanese fashion. Yet what this exhibition presents is not a conventional retrospective of a celebrated designer. Instead, it attempts something more nuanced: to read a figure who has become almost too “known” once again as “unknown.”

photo by ©︎Yuya Furukawa

The exhibition brings together approximately 200 fashion works and 130 paintings created over a career spanning more than half a century. Rather than functioning as a simple chronological archive, the exhibition consistently asks two questions: Why did these expressions emerge at that particular moment? And what meanings might they acquire today?

In that sense, this is less an exhibition about revisiting the past than one that re-reads Hiroko Koshino’s creative language through a contemporary lens.

The Designer Who Expanded Fashion Into Expression

Koshino began her career during a period when postwar Japanese culture was undergoing rapid transformation.

High economic growth, shifting perceptions of womanhood, the maturation of consumer culture, and the expansion of media all reshaped Japanese society. Moving alongside these changes, Koshino was never simply designing clothes. Through fashion, color, graphics, spatial composition, stage design, and art, she continually explored how human presence itself could be expressed.

photo by ©︎Yuya Furukawa

At the beginning of the exhibition, fashion pieces are displayed alongside ink paintings, acrylic works, oil paintings, tapestries, stage curtains created for performances at Kabukiza Theatre, and video works related to nagauta, a traditional form of Japanese musical storytelling.

What emerges is a portrait of Koshino not merely as a fashion designer, but as a singular image-maker whose practice cannot be confined to one discipline.

Rather than drawing clothes, she was drawing worlds.

That sensibility runs powerfully throughout the exhibition space.

Within the Context of Japanese Modernity

One of the exhibition’s most compelling sections is titled Intersecting Aesthetics — Hiroko Koshino and Japanese Modernity.

Here, Koshino’s work is placed in dialogue with some of the defining creative figures of postwar Japan:

Ikko Tanaka, Eiko Ishioka, and Shiro Kuramata.

This is not simply a prestigious list of names. Rather, the exhibition repositions Koshino within a lineage of creators who grappled with one central question in postwar Japan: how to connect “Japaneseness” to modernity itself.

photo by ©︎Yuya Furukawa

Vivid colors. Bold compositions. Graphic lines. A sensitivity to negative space. These elements evoke the same energy that brought Japanese design international attention during the 1970s and 1980s.

What is particularly striking is that Koshino’s garments do not function merely as “Japanese motifs.” Instead, they operate as devices that reconstruct both the body and the surrounding space.

Textile as Physical Sensation

Textiles remain central to understanding Koshino’s creative universe.

The exhibition includes newly developed fabrics, sketches, and material studies, while certain displays even allow visitors to physically touch the garments themselves.

photo by ©︎Yuya Furukawa

The experience shifts the viewer’s understanding of textiles from something purely visual into something deeply bodily. The weight of fabric. Its stiffness. Its softness. Its sheen.

Koshino’s clothing does not exist through sight alone. It becomes complete only once the body begins to move—an abstract expression designed for physical existence.

Creation as a Gift Back to the Future

Toward the end of the exhibition, works created by children participating in the Next Creation Program: Children’s Fashion Project, supervised by Koshino herself, are also on display.

What feels significant here is that Koshino does not appear to view “the future” simply as a next-generation market. Rather, there is a sense that she is attempting to return the creativity and freedom she herself once inherited to those who will come after her.

photo by ©︎Yuya Furukawa

As a result, the exhibition feels less like a retrospective summarizing a completed career and more like evidence that the act of creation is still ongoing.

Hiroko Koshino Remains “Unknown”

The exhibition title, (UN)KNOWN, is profoundly suggestive.

Known, yet still unknown.

This does not simply mean that younger generations may be unfamiliar with Hiroko Koshino. Instead, it suggests that perhaps we only believed we already understood her.

Hiroko Koshino performing a live drawing during the exhibition’s opening ceremony
photo by ©︎Yuya Furukawa


Fashion designer. One of the famed Koshino sisters. A pioneering female creator in Japan.

By dismantling those familiar images, the exhibition reveals Hiroko Koshino instead as a figure deeply intertwined with the broader history of postwar Japanese visual culture itself. And remarkably, her work still feels startlingly contemporary today.

To remain “unknown” while already being “known.”

Perhaps that is the true source of Hiroko Koshino’s creativity.