Early in the 1990s, then-20-something Keiko Seya, founder of slow-fashion label Seya, moved to Paris from Tokyo. Back home, she had been building a career working for fashion magazines. But while she didn’t have a clear plan, she knew she had to leave. “Japan was in a bubble back then. The economy was booming, people were getting rich, everything seemed possible,” she says. “Yet to me it felt very weird, almost fake.” When Seya arrived in Paris, speaking no French and only a little English, she experienced a major culture shock. “I didn’t understand why people acted, thought, and spoke the way they did. Everyone was always late. Everything was chaotic and unorganized. For some time, I felt quite isolated.”
A few months ago, Seya returned to Tokyo after 30 years in Paris. During that period, she had initially worked as a stylist and editor for publications like Tank and i-D. “I’ve been lucky and had a lot of fun, especially in the 1990s and the early 2000s. After that, fashion became a global, highly commercial industry. I didn’t like that and eventually I started to feel uncomfortable.”
In 2013, she co-founded Cristaseya with husband-and-wife duo Cristina Casini and Andrea Spotorno, two Italians — she a stylist, he a photographer — who moved to Paris from Milan nearly 25 years ago. From the start it has worked in limited-batch editions of flowy Italian-made silhouettes, sold by around 40 stockists worldwide and at its own appointment-only store in the Opéra neighbourhood. Keiko left in 2017 to launch her own label, Seya, out of her Paris studio. Cristaseya set the pace for making timeless, fabric-driven clothes outside the fashion circus. With Seya, she carries that approach forward, on her own terms and with no desire to look back. “It’s been my way of resisting working with corporate, commercial, big-money ambitions, and just making clothes, objects and accessories purely from my own creativity.”
Now that she has returned to Tokyo, Seya is experiencing culture shock all over again. “Back in Paris,” she says, “we used to make all our patterns on paper, and we had a Moroccan guy doing all our sewing from his small atelier. I would often walk in to chat and discuss the items with him.” This “human way of working,” as Seya calls it, is nothing like Japan. “Here, it’s very organized, very structured, and sometimes a bit square, to be honest.” When asked if the contrast between Paris and Tokyo extends to her daily life as well, Seya immediately replies, “Oh yes, definitely! My neighbors keep telling me I must wear room shoes and close the windows when I’m listening to music. I mean, everyone here leaves their curtains closed even during the day.”
From the start, Seya has made the experience of feeling out of place central to her eponymous label. “I like to open my mind, open my eyes, and get in contact with people living a completely different life that I’ll never fully understand.” For each collection, she travels to a different region around the world, from the Faroe Islands (Fall/Winter 2023) and Siwa Oasis in Egypt (Spring/Summer 2024) to Skinnigrove, a historic coastal village in England (Fall/Winter 2024) — once for inspiration and then again to shoot the lookbooks, often with locals as models.
The choice of locations is intuitive, almost random. For Fall/Winter 2026, Seya traveled to Tea Horse Road (Chá Ma Gu Dào), an ancient network of caravan routes stretching from China to Tibet across the Himalayas, simply because she became interested in the history of Chinese tea. Last year, Seya flew to Nong Khiaw in northern Laos to work on the Spring/Summer 2026 collection. She had visited the country before on vacation and remembered it, in her words, as “a paradise with nothing.” “The green of the mountains, the blue of the river, the soft pink of the humid air — it’s so beautiful,” she says. “At the same time, Laos is officially one of the poorest countries on earth; yet, when you meet the people there you see they’re very rich in another sense.”
Spring/Summer 2026 consists of around 30 pieces in refined blends of natural materials like organic cotton, linen and silk. There’s unstructured tailoring as well as relaxed-yet-luxurious shirting, pants and dresses — the kind of garments midsummer-day dreams are made of. A large portion is made from beautiful custom fabrics developed by Seya, including “Legacy Linen,” a double cloth woven from linen yarns, and “Summer Herringbone,” a heavily textured and airy worsted wool. As with every season, year-round objects like handcrafted pottery, raffia bags and Palo Santo candles are offered alongside a couple of carryover signature silhouettes.
One is the stripped-down “Tofu Jeans.” “The first version was in a crispy white,” Seya explains. “When it was ready, it looked like tofu, hence the name.” A pair of lightweight jeans that hardly feels like jeans — no side seams, no belt loops, minimal stitching — they reimagine Margiela’s iconic “Anatomic Trousers” for a lazy afternoon stroll. Another staple is the “Eternal Summer Shirt,” a name Seya chose to make the idea of a timeless piece a little more poetic. It’s a loose-cut, half-sleeve silhouette that appears in three versions this season, each sounding as good as it feels in real life: undyed Japanese paper (washi), brushed Egyptian Giza cotton, and a gauze-like, puffy linen.
All Seya pieces are made in Japan, mostly from Japanese fabrics, and around 35 of its 50 stockists are located there. It’s why the recent move to Tokyo, which has made running the label much easier. She might find the culture a bit rigid but there’s also that structured and organized way of working typical of Japanese manufacturers, which now works to her advantage. “They are very quick, very precise, and always polite and honest — which isn’t always the case in Europe,” she says.
Seya’s collections are unlike any other Japanese brand, though, precisely because of their European flair, a hard-to-pin-down combination of nonchalant elegance and a playful-yet-experimental approach to fabrics and fits. “No surprise,” says Brookes Boswell, who built her brand list around Seya when she opened Shop Boswell in Portland in 2016. “Seya is a kind and joyous woman. Her garments ooze casual elegance; they float around you and give you an air of confidence that feels distinctly European.”
Back in the 1990s, when Seya first encountered the work of European designers like Marc Jacobs and Dries Van Noten, she found it liberating. With her label, she is channeling that free spirit into Japanese-made collections inspired by her travels around the world. “Now that I’ve returned to Japan, I notice that a lot of people here seem to be into vintage workwear and Americana. Not me,” she says. “I really come from a very different place, wherever that is.”
