DSM Kei Ninomiya has unveiled its FW26 campaign, a portrait series featuring a deliberately diverse cast of creatives that includes designer Hiroshi Fujiwara and filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda. The casting reframes the label’s identity around the community that wears it.
For a brand built on intricate, sculptural knitwear, the choice is strategic: the garments are complex enough to carry the frame without styling theatrics.
What the portraits ultimately sell is belonging — the suggestion that DSM Kei Ninomiya’s clothes are made for people with distinct creative lives, not just for fashion.
Featuring Fujiwara, the godfather of Japanese street culture, signals an ambition to bridge the label’s avant-garde lineage with a wider cultural conversation.
The campaign departs from the model-led convention of most fashion advertising, presenting figures from music, film, and design in plain, characterful portraits.
The campaign lands as Comme des Garçons houses increasingly assert their individual identities, with Kei Ninomiya’s label emerging as one of the most commercially promising of the group’s satellites.
Kei Ninomiya, a Comme des Garçons-trained designer, has built a cult following around technical construction and organic forms that read almost architecturally.
