Alaïa has opened a pop-up boutique at oak omotesando in Tokyo's Omotesando district, ahead of a permanent flagship planned for the same neighbourhood. The space, which runs until March 31, 2027, is positioned as a meeting point of fashion, architecture, art and culture — and its centrepiece is a photographic installation by Keizo Kitajima.

'Index 0' was first unveiled at Alaïa's Summer/Fall 2026 collection show in Paris. In Tokyo, it takes the form of a panoramic screen inside the boutique, projecting Kitajima's intimate portraits of the people at the core of the maison — hands, gestures and working postures rather than clothes. The work finds the collective spirit and humanity that sustain the creative process behind each garment, treating fashion's makers as its subject.

The pop-up also pairs the house with twelvebooks, a Tokyo-based distributor specialising in art books, which has curated a selection of publications for the space. Alongside the installation, the store sells pop-up-exclusive ready-to-wear and accessories, framing the visit as an encounter with the maison's long-standing relationship with art and publishing culture as much as with its clothes.

Kitajima's presence continues a familiar pattern of fashion houses borrowing art's legitimacy — but the choice of a documentary-style portrait series focused on labour, made for the runway show itself, suggests the house wants its craftsmanship story told by an outsider's lens. Tokyo has become a testing ground for this kind of fashion-art convergence, and the months-long run through March 2027 signals that Alaïa intends the pop-up as a cultural platform rather than a short retail stunt. For Kitajima, one of Japan's most prominent photographers, the commission extends his long-standing interest in collective identity into a commercial setting, testing how portraits of working people read when they become part of the product environment itself. The twelvebooks collaboration adds a publishing layer, inviting visitors to encounter the printed image as the maison's preferred medium after the photograph itself.