On January 19, Valentino Garavani, founder of the Italian luxury brand “Valentino,” passed away. In the early 1960s, he held his first fashion shows in Florence, marking the start of his career as a pioneer of Italian haute couture. In 1968, he introduced the renowned “White Collection,” and it was around this time that the iconic “V” logo—later to become the brand’s trademark—also made its debut.

From the 1980s through the late 1990s, when “one step up from the ordinary” was a prevailing theme in marketing, mass retailers were flooded with numerous derivative brands trading on the prestige of the original Valentino. In 1997, while the department store sales in the domestic market exceeded 11 trillion yen (data based on Japan Department Stores Association), average monthly cash earnings reached 421,324 yen (at establishments with 30 or more employees; source: Monthly Labor Survey, MHLW.) However, this marked the peak of Japan’s broad middle class, and it began to erode thereafter. By 2024, average monthly earnings had declined to 397,789 yen, while the department store market had shrunk to below 6 trillion yen. Over the same period, the retail market for textile goods contracted from 14,528,800 million yen to 10,945,200 million yen. As the domestic market landscape shifted, “UNIQLO” emerged as the dominant player, expanding its sales twelvefold dramatically.

Meanwhile, the imported apparel market increased from 1,661,200 million yen in 1997 to 2,471,400 million yen in 2024. Despite temporary setbacks, including the Lehman shock, the market developed steadily with an average annual growth rate of 1.5%. That said, the structure of demand has changed. Burberry’s strategic shift illustrates this transformation. In 2015, Burberry’s U.K. headquarters terminated its licensing agreement with Sanyo Shokai Ltd. and moved to an exclusively direct-to-consumer model in Japan, selling only imported products through its own stores. By deliberately giving up market share in Japan, Burberry committed fully to a global strategy focused on wealthy consumers and inbound tourists.

What, then, were the results? In 2024, Burberry’s sales in Japan nearly doubled compared with 2015, while Valentino achieved growth of approximately 2.5 times. Over the past decade, the number of wealthy households in Japan has steadily increased, and, as is widely known, the inbound market has also expanded. What has long supported so-called “Japan-quality” is a mid-to-upper segment of the domestic market that has consistently pursued high quality. If domestic demand is destined to shrink quantitatively, then restoring competitiveness in global markets is the key to breaking away from the “cheap Japan” — a term describing the current status of Japan as a low-cost economy. Remaining inward-looking is no longer viable.

*Data on the textile goods retail market, the apparel retail market, and the imported luxury brand market were sourced from our survey publications: Textile Industry, Apparel Industry, and Imported Luxury Brands Market.

This Week’s Focus, January 18 - 23, 2026
Takashi Mizukoshi, the President