My Style Heroes: Arianna Cho
My Style Heroes: Arianna Cho
A conversation with the prolific anime + fashion collector feat. high fashion collabs with Dyson (yes, that Dyson), otaku nails, a Japanese designer shopping list, and more.
Hi guys! I had always admired Arianna Cho, seeing her pop up again and again in my online haunts—HR favorite Liana Satenstein wrote up her and her clothes collection (Comme Des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, Naoki Takizawa’s era of Issey Miyake, and Undercover) for Vogue, another perennial inspiration, Liisa Jokinen of Gem App, wrote about her the same year, and on and on.
I followed her a while back, excited to see photos of her 500-some pieces of archival Japanese designer clothes and musings from her time working as a buyer and allocator at powerhouses like Issey Miyake and Loewe, and the other week, was graced with this photo on my feed:
If you’ve been reading HR for even a few weeks, you probably already know that I’ve been watching One Piece these past few months—I’m now up to episode 600-something, and have been spoiled enough to recognize the above figures as characters at a pivotal moment in the series I’ve, at this point, dedicated my soul to. I immediately messaged Arianna asking to talk anime, manga, and fashion, and she kindly gave me some of her time, though when I apologized for taking so much of it, she was like “I could literally talk about these two things forever. Let’s keep going.” So we did, and below is a sample of our conversation, with spoilers dutifully cut out and my paean to Bon Clay figurines omitted for your sake.
Read on for thoughts on the intersections of animanga and fashion, decisive takes on the eras of Issey Miyake from someone who knows her shit (+ thoughts on the TikTok “flattering” discourse…), a peek at how Arianna would style Eren Yeager, and much more, and follow Arianna on Instagram for even more inspiration (and her closet archive account for jealousy fuel). If you read to the end, you’ll be rewarded with a handful of shoppable pieces curated based on this conversation and the photos Arianna shared with me. Enjoy, and a huge thank you to Arianna for all this insight.
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Which did you get into first, anime or fashion?
I grew up with a television—in first grade, my lunch box was Sailor Moon. I was always drawn to cartoons, my whole life. It didn't necessarily have to be anime, but it's something that I never got rid of as I grew up. As I got a little older, my taste developed, favoring anime more—Dragon Ball Z and a little bit of Inuyasha. I don’t think I had a good grasp on those two, so later I rewatched them. My personal style started developing when I turned 18, so I think those shows were always background influences in the way I dressed, you know?
How do you incorporate anime into your style? Do you ever wear merch or take inspiration directly from characters?
I never intentionally think I'm going to dress like an anime character, It just happens to turn out that way. I often end up dressing like a Pokémon Gym leader, what Sabrina or league champion Cynthia would wear.
I don’t wear much merch—I have a lot of random T-shirts, but usually I wear them at the gym. I'm the most popular person at my gym because everyone around me is an otaku, so they're like, whoa, that's such a sick Dragon Ball Z sweatshirt—I've literally had it forever.
Which anime do you think has the best fashion inspiration, and which character’s wardrobe would you wear?
I think because it’s really long and has so many characters, you could easily say One Piece, but I think the most probably fashionable anime would be Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, because there are just so many elements of style. I love Bruno—his style is not “me,” but… it's me. You know what I mean? Hunter X Hunter also has so many good fits, I don't dress like Chrollo, but at the same time, I feel Chrollo-isms in my style.
I've had anime nails, a lot of them, and they're always so crazy. I had a Gel-X extension and then I did a red French tip—that manicure was Shanks [from One Piece] with the scars.
I did one that was all orange dragon balls, and recently I did nails based off Pain from Naruto. The more literal anime style I have is always reflected by my nails.
Is there a connection between your love of animanga and the fact that you really tend towards Japanese designers?
They’re so, so separate. I got into Japanese designers actually from Margiela, Margiela was the first brand I was really obsessed with. I was wearing tabi boots in 2014 when everyone was making fun of my feet. I did a paper in college on the history of the tabi boot, which is how I first learned a little bit about Japan, but then I was looking at what people wore with Margiela in the 90s and 2000s, and I read the name Rei Kawakubo and I was like, who's that? I looked her up. OK, sold. I'm in a cult.
Whenever I start liking a brand, there is a first collection I always like and it will stay with me forever. “Broken Bride”, the AW05 collection from Comme Des Garçons was the first I saw, and I'm still obsessed. I'll never not be obsessed.
I very much get the tunnel vision, the fixation on a collection or piece—is there any specific garment that has recently consumed your mind, you had to have it?
There are a couple! First, I love the Dyson collection for Issey Miyake. I used to work for Issey Miyake for a while and I was buying for Pleats, Please and Bao Bao—I liked Pleats, don't get me wrong, it's fine, but I was really tunnel vision for pieces from Naoki [Takizawa]’s time. I don't really care for the work of [Yoshiyuki] Miyamae-san or [Satoshi] Kondo-san, even though Issey Miyake himself was the first designer, his work is not my fave, and I do not like Dai Fujiwara’s work as creative director. However, I think his collaboration with Dyson is so special. It's Dai’s, it's not Naoki’s. I always wanted stuff from it, especially the things with light print on them and in that water-resistant fabric, but the way people are selling it online…I'm not paying $3,000 for that, I'm just not.
One day I was going on Mercari and I was looking through everything as I do every day, 15 times a day, because that's all I do, and I was like, wait, no way they're selling this dress for $130. OK, sold.
I bought it—it is a little tight, and I don't care. And I thought, even more hilarious that people are trying to sell this for like 3K online. I refuse to buy from others who are just trying to make profit. The prices went up on Issey Miyake for two reasons, in my opinion. First, the pandemic—Pleats, Please became the new sweatpants, right? I worked there at the time. We were just starting to get young people to shop Issey Miyake. It was, up to that point, so many old people. To be honest, the original client is kind of dying out, so we were trying to modernize the style, but it wasn't there yet.
Once it hit the pandemic, everybody was in Pleats, and then somehow, [the artist and Miyake collaborator] Aya Takano became so popular with Gen Z, so people started looking into Naoki Takizawa. At the time, there were things being sold online that were like $20, yes. But there were also things that were $10,000. I was like, “what is going on?” Even when I talked with Naoki-san about it, he was always shocked. Then after Issey Miyake passed away [in 2022], the prices really went up. No one should feel bad about this, but people don’t know the differences between Dai’s time, Naoki’s time, Issey Miyake’s time…Totally fine, but when people were posting all the postmortem tributes and stuff, they were like, “…and this gorgeous Issey Miyake piece” and I was like, he didn't even design that…
So when that girl said Issey Miyake isn't flattering, it lit a fire in me. It’s okay to be critical. I have no problem with any critique. If you say “it doesn't look good on me, particularly,” that's fine. That could be true. But to put everything into one bubble when there are so many different techniques…from the Issey Miyake brand in general, you do have pleated garments, but you also have A-POC for a more fitted silhouettes, you have mixed fabrics, you have things that are folded in weird ways and when they come out they’re very architectural on the body. I saw her little thing today on Tiktok, and she was like, “I deleted it because people were misconstruing what I was talking about” or whatever, and then I looked at her slide, and she was talking about the Issey Miyake main line, but she kept saying Pleats, Please. And then she said the PR team was giving people in the comments discounts…I know the PR girl! That was ridiculous.
One thing that is so compelling to me about anime is that so often characters only wear one outfit—how do you feel about uniform dressing, and have you ever experimented with only having a couple outfits in your rotation?
I don't love uniform dressing because we have a lot of different moods and vibes—I think it's nice to accurately show those instead of just keeping with one idea. Although I understand the concept, it's not really for me. Also, I have 500 pieces of clothing in my apartment, so I am wearing everything to death. If I'm going to have this much, everything needs to be worn, which is why I'm trying to document every single outfit of mine in February and trying to give everything a fair chance instead of just re-wearing the same thing because I got it recently and I'm excited about it. What I'll do often is I take everything out of the closet, I look at everything, I'll be like, “Oh my God, I haven't seen this in a while, this I definitely have to wear this week.”
Is there any piece of clothing in anime that you've seen and you've been like “I need that to exist in real life” (for me it’s Sanji's shirt that says ‘Gentlecook’ on it, which I realized does exist on Etsy)?
That's a really good question. I haven't really thought about it that deeply. The thing that's coming to mind is, I always wanted to recreate Nico Robin's original look.
It's not my style, but I want to Arianna-fy it. I don't want to cosplay—what I want to do is find, like, the Comme version of a given anime outfit. I always think about that.
I try to do that for the One Piece character Jewelry Bonney—I have Undercover shorts that are brown and look similar to hers, the white tank top could be a Loewe one that I have in my closet, and for her jacket, I have this Issey Miyake SS04 bondage-type of Velcro jacket that would work…
I deleted it, but you would have loved this account I used to have “Steal Their Anime Look.” I would have people send me DMs of characters and I would put together the high fashion version of their look. I was doing that while working at Loewe and quit (the account) because I was so stressed from the amount of DMs I was getting. The brand I used the most in those stylings was probably Marni for its bright colors and cartoonish graphics.
The one that I feel like at the time I was really excited about doing was Future Trunks—I Iove Dragon Ball Z, especially Trunks, so I was really excited about putting that outfit together, and I am not a pants wearer. I usually am much more feminine, but I would still like to make my own Future Trunks outfit eventually.
Do you think that fashion and anime have any points of intersection?
I think that fashion is always inspired and influenced by culture and a lot of that is art, and anime is an art form in Japan. As Japanese culture permeates through the Western world, we see it more and more in high fashion. So, you know, Gucci did a collaboration with Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and Undercover did one with Evangelion. I didn't like that one actually, because it was too literal. That's the problem I have with fashion and anime, when it's just, like, screen printed. I ideally would like a collaboration where I feel like I'm in the world of the character, not like I’m wearing merch.
I'm wearing this dress today, Undercover SS05, an homage to Jan Švankmajer, the Czech surrealist filmmaker. One of the primary influences on the collection is his film Alice. It's so cool—It's a mix between live action and stop motion. This collection isn’t like, “she wore this exact dress, so I'm going to recreate it.” It's like this is a dress Alice could wear, or this kind of feels like it would be on the wall, the print of the peeling wallpaper, or this feels like this kind of print would be on a plate in those movies. I feel like Undercover did that really well.
Obviously, brands want to make money, but I wish some high fashion labels could do world-building collaborations that feel like they could exist within the sphere of whoever they are collaborating with. If they’re going to be doing a Yu Yu Hakusho collab, I want to be in the spirit world with Koenma. I feel like a lot of brands have an aesthetic that can be looked at like Star Wars, which I can see like in a Rick Owens or a Comme or whatever, but it doesn't feel like, let's put a Sith Lord on a t-shirt. I know Loewe x Studio Ghibli is really popular, and I like that we have Ōtori-sama printed on a puzzle bag—don't worry, I have it. I get it. But ideally, I want to feel like Chihiro in collaboration clothing, I don't want to be like, “hey, I like this movie.”
What's the biggest lesson you've learned from the intersection of anime and the fashion world?
Both taught me perseverance. You keep trying, maybe the first answer is no, but if you keep trying and if you keep training, you'll be strong enough to defeat whatever. I think that's really relevant in life. Sometimes you have a bad mental health day and you feel like it's the end of the world, but you can do it, you know?
I've had to persevere when I'm looking for specific items and someone is trying to sell it to me for $3,000, and then I find it in Japan for $130. You don't have to find something immediately. I know you might want this item, but you can be patient and then someone will make a mistake and sell it to you for a really low amount of money! I recently bought a leather coat—It's Issey Miyake from AW04. It feels like butter. This lady listed it for I don't know how much, but then I was like, “hi, how's $70.00.” I got it!
I do this all the time, but you need to have perseverance and be able to be like, OK, so they said no to this offer, I'm gonna just keep going, keep trying until they say yes. In terms of both a small example like searching for clothes and something larger like mental health, the more you get used to rejections and the more that you can coexist with them, the better you'll be able to persevere and live your life.
Thank you so much, Arianna, for sharing your thoughts and obsessions with HR!
Here are some shoppable pieces with curation inspired by my conversation with Arianna and (mostly) shockingly decent prices:
And just for fun:
Thanks for being here, as always.
<3 HR
Really enjoyed this interview, thank you!