Melanger Etranger
Yuka Kobayashi
Yuka Kobayashi was born in Japan and majored in philosophy at a Japanese university. After graduating, while working at a hospital, she liked Harajuku kawaii fashion in Tokyo, and started wearing Lolita fashion like medieval European aristocrats and self-taught costume making. In 2017, she joined JICA's Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers to support people with disabilities and orphans at a social welfare center in Benin, West Africa.
She fell in love with the colorful African wax prints of West African culture. She feels sympathy for Harajuku fashion and African fashion, and she designs Lolita fashion using African fabrics. In 2019, after she returned to Japan, she attended a dressmaking school and started studying her clothing.
In 2020, she established "Melanger Etranger", the world's first and only Lolita fashion brand using African fabrics. Melanger Etranger means "to mix foreign things" in French, and it is to mix the traditional cultures of various regions such as Japan, Africa, Asia, and Europe, respect each other's culture, and create new value. Thoughts are put into it. Her work coexists with the power of African fabrics, the glamorous style of medieval Europe, and the pop of Harajuku girls.
She also makes unisex shirts, wedding dresses and tuxedos in African fabrics because she wants to spread the charm of Africa to many people. If you wear these clothes, you will be impressed by your new self and shine more attractively.
The collection concept of MFW2024S/S is "re-blooming of precious ordinary and slightly special weekend". People meet, get involved, and laugh together, and things that are taken for granted are blooming again like spring flowers. Express your heart's excitement by changing into something special to go see someone special on the weekend.