KIKO MIZUHARA

After two decades in fashion, the influential multi-hyphenate is moving into a new space, both literally and figuratively.

- AMELIA CHIA

To Kiko Mizuhara, hugs are a novel thing. It’s not something she embraced growing up, neither were they offered in abundance. Growing up in Japan, in a country notorious for its lack of public displays of affection, or skinship as they call it, a non-hugging culture was an accepted norm to her. This was until Mizuhara set foot in the US for the first time after the COVID-19 pandemic to visit her boyfriend, keyboardist and record producer John Carroll Kirby.

“It’s really beautiful that people are hugging and expressing themselves,” Mizuhara tells me earnestly over a Zoom call. “In Japan, we don’t express our emotions. We think that overly expressing our emotions could be overwhelming to others. So, we don’t hug. There’s no such thing as physical touch as an expression in our culture.

“It is crazy to me that I spend all this time with my family and I never think of hugging them. I went to my mum after coming back from the US and said, ‘Mum, it sounds weird, but I want to hug you’. In the beginning, it was a bit awkward, but now we hug all the time.”

Mizuhara giggles, holding up her phone as she walks down the hallway of her brightly lit apartment to find a comfortable spot. It is 10.15am in Paris, where she is at the moment for Paris Fashion Week. She eyes a couch in the distance and deems it worthy, before plopping herself down with a flourish. Dressed in an oversized white T-shirt with a chihuahua on it, Mizuhara is prettily bare-faced, her dark chest-length hair brushed casually over her shoulders and her oval face glowing with insouciance.