She began haunting flea markets and temple sales, buying stained obis, frayed happi coats, and moth-eaten wool blankets. Her bedroom became a patchwork laboratory. She disassembled, rearranged, and reimagined, stitching together contradictions: a Meiji-era fireman’s coat with a 1980s punk rock T-shirt; a wedding kimono’s silk crane with a military jacket’s brass buttons. Her classmates called her “the rag witch.” She took it as a compliment.
When the pandemic hit, Yayoi turned her atelier into a free repair clinic. People left torn jeans, frayed collars, and childhood blankets on her doorstep. She mended them all, sometimes adding small embroidered flowers over the holes—a signature touch. “Mending is not hiding,” she wrote in her hand-printed zine, Stitch & Breathe . “Mending is witnessing.”
Growing up in the coastal town of Kamakura, Yayoi was surrounded by old things: ancient shrines, rusted bicycle bells, and her grandmother’s kimono chest filled with silks that smelled of cedar and time. While other children drew superheroes, Yayoi sketched seams and darts. By age seven, she had sewn her first complete garment—a slightly lopsided apron for her favorite plush rabbit. By ten, she was altering her school uniform, shortening hems and adding hidden pockets, much to her teachers’ bewilderment.
Her first collection, “Kintsugi for Clothes,” featured a men’s dress shirt that had been torn, re-stitched with gold silk thread, and lined with a 1920s French lace tablecloth. A journalist from a niche craft magazine showed up, wrote a glowing two-paragraph review, and promptly forgot about it. Yayoi did not mind. She had exactly three customers that month—one of whom was her mother.
Then, unexpectedly, the internet found her. A Korean street-style photographer snapped a passerby wearing Yayoi’s patchwork jacket: a navy blue japanese firefighter’s coat merged with a hot pink Vietnamese ao dai. The image went viral. Within a week, orders trickled in from Seoul, then London, then Melbourne. By the end of the year, she had a waiting list six months long.