A Wardrobe in Transition — Rethinking it through World Cup Cycles — Vol. I

On Time and Climate

30 June 2026. Full Moon. Today, Japan faced Brazil at the FIFA World Cup. The wall was high — but Japan stood their ground, and that alone belongs to history.

There is no sport I find more beautiful, more deeply loveable, than football.

Highly trained men, bound by the seemingly absurd rule that only their feet may touch the ball, chase a single sphere across the pitch in every direction imaginable. The thrill of a defensive line breaking in an instant. The tension of knowing time is finite. The drama that emerges from both. And yet — a match can go the full ninety minutes without the net ever moving. What magnificent inefficiency.

In a world that worships productivity — "cost-effectiveness," "time-efficiency," "AI-powered optimisation" — that inefficiency strikes me as quietly, stubbornly beautiful.

Following football expanded my mental map of Europe. Small towns. Smaller clubs. Flickers of local history I never would have found otherwise. And when I moved to London, such knowledge became a kind of social currency in one of the most culturally layered cities on earth.

My late uncle, born in the early Showa era — around 1940 — played for the football club at Waseda University. Had he been born a generation later, he might well have become a professional player. Because of him, football was simply part of life from early on.

When Junichi Inamoto — who had made his name at the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup — transferred to Arsenal under Arsène Wenger, I started following matches in Europe. In time, I was making my own way to Saint-Denis to watch PSG, and then to Wembley for a Champions League final — neither trip having anything to do with Inamoto anymore. I simply loved watching football.

When I eventually moved to London, one of the quiet pleasures was watching European football without the tyranny of time zones.

I'll be honest: that level of intensity is no longer quite where I am.

And yet. Every World Cup year, that thing arrives.

That thing is the urge to reassess my wardrobe. And reassessing a wardrobe, for me, is really reassessing a life. It's a chance to look back at the past four years — and to look forward to the next four.

2002 — Korea/Japan
2006 — Germany
2010 — South Africa
2014 — Brazil
2018 — Russia
2022 — Qatar

At each of these tournaments, I was different. Physically, professionally, aesthetically, philosophically. The people I wanted to be with. What I believed mattered. The degree of change varied — but not once did I arrive at a World Cup unchanged from the last.

And so, naturally, what I was wearing — and what I wanted to wear — had changed too.

I returned to Japan in the autumn of 2018, so this is now my third World Cup back. The 2022 edition came too soon after losing my father, and too close to starting a new job. Life hadn't settled. There was no room for a wardrobe rethink. Which means this year's feels overdue — and possibly significant.

I am the type who likes to ground myself in a little knowledge before diving in. So I picked up a book that had been generating quiet buzz: 1,000 Pieces of Clothing Later by Hiruta Sachiko — a book about the thousand items she let go of, and what that process revealed.

I've been reading fashion essays since my teens, so I've covered a fair amount of this territory. But this one landed differently. Perhaps because her thought patterns, and certain experiences from her early years, felt unexpectedly close to my own. The "1,000 pieces" is a hook — arresting, concrete, impossible to ignore. But the book itself isn't really about quantity. It's about the mindset you bring to getting dressed. The stance. The relationship. Things that are invisible, but undeniably there.

The insight that felt most immediately useful: dress with purpose. And in order to do that — think about the scenes that make up your daily life.

So I began factoring my own life.

I work full-time at an international tech company, while also running Momo & Co. — a solo creative studio I launched earlier this year. I'm in the office at most four days a week, with no dress code to speak of. My role doesn't require me to be client-facing every day, so suits are rarely necessary. A handful of times per year — perhaps five in the first half, two in the second — I represent the company in front of customers and need to dress accordingly.

As an HSP-HSS introvert (INFJ, for those who speak Myers-Briggs), my weekends are, frankly, quiet. People often assume otherwise — I can be sociable, and I do have a tendency to act on things — but most weekends I'm close to home. I think of weekends as recovery time: I want to spend them with people who genuinely energise me, and on looking after my mind and body. The morning disappears into laundry, cleaning, and a grocery run. The afternoon fills with leftover work, reading, coffee, something sweet, and long interior monologues about everything and nothing. By the time I surface, it's evening. On those days: no makeup, comfort over style. Of course, there are exceptions — a lunch, dinner out, or drinks with favourite people, a salon visit, a training session, a day out. Maybe four or five times a month. Those days, I make an effort.

And at least twice a year, I travel internationally. Work takes me to the United States. Time for myself takes me, almost always, to Europe.

So. What does purposeful dressing actually look like for this particular life?

I ran through some specific items in my head — and what I found was a gap. Between what I own, and what I actually need.

This is the wardrobe paradox that many women know well: I have clothes, and yet I have nothing to wear.

What it means, more precisely: I own enough clothing that going outside unclothed for the foreseeable future is not a concern. And yet — none of it quite fits who I am now. My taste has shifted. My body has changed. The purpose has changed. And, I realised, so has the climate.

That last one caught me off guard.

One insight from Hiruta's book that stuck: lean into outerwear variety. We tend to minimise our coats and jackets, she argues — but a little range in that outermost layer lifts your mood and adds welcome change. It's the first thing you see on yourself. The first thing others see on you.

And thinking about outerwear led me somewhere else.

In the eight years since I returned to Japan, the climate has shifted in ways I feel in my body. Spring arrives humid earlier than it used to. Summer is longer. Autumn barely exists anymore before winter appears. The transitional coat — the piece that worked for both spring and autumn — has become something of a fiction.The light layers that once bridged the seasons no longer quite work.

Three things to fix. Three things to aim for:

To dress for a Japan that is becoming more tropical by the year.
To wear things that feel genuinely comfortable, and that give me a quiet confidence.
To rebuild a wardrobe that can carry me through the second half of my life.

Fashion, I think, is a kind of total art form — assembled from countless variables, never quite finished. And it is something everyone creates, every single day, whether they think of it that way or not.

The World Cup anthem plays. The crowd roars. I open the wardrobe door.

The clothes I've been slowly gathering since spring seem, quietly, to be finding their way toward now — and toward what comes next.

To be continued…