In response to a shifting menswear landscape, the Japanese designer dials things down.
Ahead of the Maison Mihara Yasuhiro Autumn/Winter 2026 show, Yashiro Mihara (he used his last name as his first when starting the brand in 1997) cited Margaret Howell as a source of inspiration. The British designer is a master of the quiet stuff, like unstructured suits, premium knits, and uber-high quality cotton shirts. Mihara is known more for his technical innovations, and for building on vintage garments.
The prevailing trend for simple, easy-going clothes that work into a range of wardrobes isn’t the work he’s known for. This a designer who has carved a name with oversized bomber jackets, dishevelled suiting, and jean-track pants hybrids – playful remixes of the classic stuff. But his latest offering struck a more muted chord. There was roomy single-breasted suiting. But it was off-kilter and fastened asymmetrically. Then came pooling corduroy trousers, smart shirts and striped ties.
“As I’m getting old and my eyes aren’t as good, I see things [a little] distorted sometimes. So I wanted to make something, for example a jacket with my [altered] vision and also I wanted to make items that have a misalignment and view of distortion into this fixed creation,” says Mihara.
The collection is a response to a shifting industry.“In recent years, more simple styles have been popular in the industry, so we wanted to try some kind of basics in a simple style, but it didn’t work. So these are the questions that didn’t work,” he shared. “I wanted to make a style like Margaret Howell with the quiet luxury for this kind of thing but it didn’t work.”
Images Courtesy of Maison Mihara Yasuhiro
That’s not to say it was lacking in bangers. Layered parka jackets and bomber jackets paired well with shirts and ties, heavyweight trench coats were deeply solid, and extremely wearable – exactly what Mihara set out to do. While sticker-bombed tracksuits worn with bomber jackets straddled this collection’s vision and the brand’s core DNA, breaking out of the parameters of muted design into something wackier.
Sure, Maison Mihara Yasuhiro can do the outlandish stuff. But with its AW26 offering, it showed it can try its hand on quiet stuff, too. “I feel many designers are tired of the obligation. I think simple style can be boring for many of us,” says Mihara. “We would like to change something, but we don’t know what the change we need to incorporate needs to be. So this kind of feeling feeds into our collections.
