There is something wonderfully unsettling about realizing the world you have been trying to reach was above you all along.

For Spring/Summer 2027, yushokobayashi begins with precisely that realization. The collection, “MeRmaid’s Tears,” grew partly from something designer Yusho Kobayashi was told after winning the Tokyo Fashion Award: “I thought you would always remain in the underground scene, Yusho.” Suddenly, the underground was no longer simply an aesthetic position. It became a physical place. Kobayashi imagined looking upward and discovering that what appeared to be the sky was actually the surface of the sea.

That thought sends the collection toward The Little Mermaid, though this is far removed from Disney’s polished kingdom of singing crustaceans and happily-ever-afters. Kobayashi is interested in the darker transaction underneath the fairy tale. The mermaid gets the body she desires but loses her voice. She learns to walk, but walking hurts. She reaches the surface, only to discover heartbreak. “What is the price for me to rise to the surface?” the collection notes ask.

I love that question because fashion loves ascension. Designers are always emerging, breaking through, being discovered. Kobayashi asks what happens after discovery. “MeRmaid’s Tears” dresses that uncomfortable moment in lace, sequins, pearls, drawings, tangled threads and clothes that appear to have washed ashore carrying evidence of another life. Even the models appear to cry, with jeweled trails descending beneath their eyes.

What follows is not a conventional mermaid fantasy. It feels more like opening a trunk recovered from the seabed and finding that everything inside has somehow continued dreaming.

Liquid silver

The first selected look makes the sea impossible to ignore without printing an obvious ocean across the body. A sleeveless silver sequin dress hangs loosely over a white illustrated top, its elongated sleeves tied and interrupted around the arms. White tights continue the bleached palette downward before wonderfully odd shoes inject acidic green and pink into the equation.

The sequins are especially effective. They behave differently depending on the light, creating the broken reflections you see when sunlight hits moving water. Yet the dress itself is almost blunt in shape. That tension keeps the look from becoming precious.

Then there is the face. Crystal tears descend beneath the eyes while an icy, organic-looking headpiece crowns the model. She looks less like a mermaid princess than someone who has just been pulled from an unfamiliar ecosystem. That distinction matters. Kobayashi’s ocean is beautiful because it is strange.

Washed lace

White could have become bridal here. Instead, Kobayashi makes it look excavated.

Lace, eyelet, ruffles and translucent panels accumulate across the body in mismatched layers. The blouse appears assembled from fragments, while the skirt moves between denser lace and transparent sections that expose the legs underneath. Nothing looks perfectly preserved. That is exactly why it works.

I kept thinking about sea foam gathering around objects at the shoreline. The different whites do something similar, piling softness upon softness without becoming visually flat. Even the shoes seem overtaken by fabric, as though the clothing has begun growing across them.

There is also something almost Victorian about the lace, but it has been shaken loose from Victorian propriety. Kobayashi takes materials associated with innocence and romance and lets them become irregular, vulnerable and slightly ghostly. This mermaid has reached land carrying the remnants of another century.

Souvenir sea

This is where the collection gets mischievous.

A graphic T-shirt is layered with a pale illustrated panel and an oversized, cartoonish green accessory wrapped across the hips. Underneath sits a short, translucent white skirt decorated with dimensional circles, while opaque pink tights turn the legs into blocks of artificial color.

The result reminds me of a souvenir shop discovered underwater after civilization disappeared. Graphics, drawings, logos and decorative objects survive, but their original meanings have become scrambled.

That visual collision feels very contemporary. We live surrounded by images that have been copied, reposted and removed from their original contexts. Kobayashi approaches clothing similarly. Rather than making every component agree, he allows different visual languages to coexist.

It is chaotic, yes, but deliberately so. The sea does not organize what falls into it.

Tangled treasure

If Ariel collected forks, Kobayashi’s mermaid apparently collected everything else.

A dark puff-sleeve top becomes the foundation for an extraordinary web of pearls, cords, lace, beads, charms and dangling objects. Below, enormous printed trousers introduce another layer of hand-drawn graphics. The body becomes a moving archive.

This might be my favorite expression of the collection’s seabed idea because it refuses the obvious route. There are no literal scales required. Instead, Kobayashi recreates the sensation of things becoming entangled underwater. The embellishments resemble fishing nets that have accidentally accumulated jewelry, shells and human debris.

There is beauty in that excess. More importantly, there is personality. The wearer does not look decorated so much as burdened with memories, carrying pieces of the world she came from as she attempts to enter another.

Split romance

Black, white and powdered pink turn this dress into a collision between mourning clothes and a doll’s wardrobe.

The black lace center establishes a dark vertical line, while white crochet and lace spread across one side and a pink lace panel interrupts the other. Pearls hang loosely across the torso. A pale blue ruffled collar brings the face into the composition, while tall blue boots strapped around the legs make the sweetness suddenly feel tougher.

That clash is essential. The Little Mermaid is a romantic story built around bodily pain, and Kobayashi refuses to separate those two ideas. Delicate lace sits beside footwear that almost resembles protective equipment.

I particularly like that the dress never resolves itself into perfect symmetry. It feels emotionally divided. Part of it belongs beneath the water, part of it is already imagining land.

Pastel current

Here, Kobayashi lets color drift rather than shout.

Pale yellow, lavender, white, pink and watery blue move through layers of mesh and lace. The irregular hem creates strips and panels that seem suspended around the body, while a soft white bag hangs almost anonymously at the side. Then the boots arrive in glossy pink and purple, anchoring all that delicacy with something more synthetic.

The palette reminds me of light passing through shallow water, when colors lose their hard edges and begin bleeding into one another.

What makes the look convincing is its lack of conventional polish. Threads hang. Layers overlap imperfectly. Fabrics appear patched together. Kobayashi understands that fantasy becomes more interesting when you can see the seams holding it together.

Captured color

A pale yellow shirt sits beneath a long white lace layer, but underneath that transparency are enormous pools of pink, turquoise and blue.

It looks as though color has been trapped beneath a fishing net.

That is such a simple visual proposition, yet it communicates the collection beautifully. The lace acts almost like the surface separating two environments. What lies beneath remains visible, distorted but never erased.

I also appreciate the relative restraint. After the density of some earlier looks, this one gives the eye room to understand Kobayashi’s layering. The garments are not simply stacked for decoration. Transparency becomes a storytelling device. One life remains visible underneath another.

Perhaps that is the collection’s most human idea. Transformation does not necessarily mean replacement.

Shore patrol

A cropped blue jacket with puffed sleeves and ruffled edges brings an almost storybook neatness to the upper body. Then everything below begins unraveling.

Loose netting hangs around the hips over illustrated trousers, with threads dropping toward tall brown boots. The contrast is fantastic. Above the waist, there is structure. Below it, the sea appears to have taken over.

The jacket’s saturated blue panels almost resemble fragments of maps or water seen from above. Against the distressed netting, they give the impression of someone trying to dress properly while still carrying the ocean around her waist.

That push between order and disorder makes the look memorable. Kobayashi’s mermaid may have reached land, but she has not been cleaned up for human consumption.

Paper princess

And then comes the crown.

A transparent blue headpiece sits above a voluminous cream top that appears crumpled, folded and gathered like paper caught in a current. Beneath it, white lace descends unevenly over pink tights, while fabric-covered shoes return the collection to its strange, handmade tenderness.

There is royalty here, but Kobayashi deliberately refuses grandeur in the conventional sense. The crown looks fragile. The dress looks temporary. The materials appear as though they could crease, tear or dissolve.

That makes the image far more affecting than a polished princess finale would have been. It resembles a child constructing royal clothes from whatever washed onto shore, except the result carries an adult understanding of disappointment.

The mermaid finally gets her crown. It just happens to belong to a kingdom she had to invent herself.

Above water

By the end of “MeRmaid’s Tears,” I stopped thinking about mermaids.

I started thinking about ambition.

Kobayashi’s question, “What is the price for me to rise to the surface?” reaches well beyond the fairy tale that inspired the collection. Anyone working in a creative field understands the temptation of the surface. You want people to notice. You want the bigger room, the better seat, the recognition that tells you all those years underground meant something. Then you arrive and discover that visibility comes with its own strange weather.

That is why the clothes’ imperfections feel important. Kobayashi does not dress transformation as a clean before-and-after story. Lace remembers what sits underneath it. Nets carry debris. Pearls become tangled. Threads remain loose. Tears are allowed to stay on the face.

The collection statement imagines the little mermaid initially mistaking her tears for seawater left inside her body. She is happy, briefly, because she believes a piece of the sea still lives within her. Then she discovers what tears actually mean.

That image stayed with me.

There is something deeply moving about entering the world you wanted and discovering emotions you could never have understood from below. Kobayashi translates that realization into clothes without surrendering his eccentricity. If anything, reaching the surface seems to have given him more room to be strange.

And that may be the best answer to the collection’s central question. Rising does not have to mean leaving the underground version of yourself at the bottom. Sometimes you carry the sea with you.

yushokobayashiの服を目の前にすると、レースやパール、絡み合う糸、涙のように光る装飾まで、一見ばらばらなものがひとつの世界をつくっていることに惹かれました。特に印象に残ったのは、繊細なものと少し奇妙で遊び心のあるものが、同じ服の中で自然に共存していたことです。きれいに整えるのではなく、その違和感まで魅力に変えてしまうところに、yushokobayashiらしさを感じました。