‘FASHION POWER’: ZARNY, THE MYANMAR REFUGEE TURNED TOKYO DESIGNER
HAVING fled Myanmar for Japan with his parents as a child, Shibuya Zarny began his fashion career as a model in Tokyo and went on to make clothes for royalty. “Fashion is an art that has enabled me to survive,” the designer, whose label recently held a 10-year anniversary show in Bangkok, told AFP.
The runway looks featured nods to Southeast Asian design, from leaf and eye motifs to jewellery worn under colourful jackets by shirtless male models.
Zarny’s parents came to Japan as political refugees in 1993 when he was eight. As a teenager, dressing with style became a way for him to avoid being bullied. His mother first taught him dressmaking, and before long Zarny, with his slim silhouette and intense stare, had been scouted as a model on a dance floor in the capital.
“At the time we had no Instagram,” he recalled, so to see and be seen he would hang out at bars, arcades and novelty photo booths called purikura.
Zarny often went to Shibuya, the youthful district he later took as his first name.
“At that time Shibuya was really dangerous. There was a whole underground scene” with yakuza gangsters, he said.
As his career took flight, Zarny launched his eponymous label in 2011, a year before finally securing Japanese nationality. The fledgling designer gifted 70 longyi — a traditional garment that ties at the waist — to Myanmar democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
She wore a lilac one to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, a moment which Zarny said “changed my life”. Alongside his catwalk endeavours over the following years, Zarny acted as a mediator between Japan and Myanmar. He even accompanied Japan’s Princess Yoko of Mikasa — dressed in a Zarny original — on a visit there in 2019.