Recession Rags.

Japanese fashion designer Shinichiro Arakawa is seeing red --literally. His fall collection, revealed at the Paris pret-a-porter shows, is filled with red dresses, jackets and pants. Why is the 34-year-old from Gumma prefecture so attached to the hue? "When colors are filtered through red, they become more similar," he says. And that reflects the way the global culture is homogenizing, Arakawa thinks. "You walk the streets in Tokyo, and the small neighborhood shops have been replaced by convenience stores," he says. "You go to Harajuku, and everyone is wearing the same thing. Something unique about individuals is becoming lost. We're all turning red."

In Arakawa's case, however, red is the color of angry change. A new generation of Japanese fashion designers are rising up from the country's shattered economy, and they are confronting the forces of conventional style--and globalization--head-on. Their point of view is iconoclastic, witty and often self-deprecating. Their clothes are mocking and playful, with sleek lines and sometimes asymmetrical cuts. In this era of multitasking, their creations often double as art objects, advertisements or anime cartoons, turning fashion into just another form of multimedia entertainment. They market their product using guerrilla tactics, often attacking large corporations from Uniqlo to Burger King. And they are sparking interest across the globe. "When I go to Paris and London and Milan, everybody is asking what is happening in the Tokyo scene," says Kazz Yamamuro, executive director for Fashion Television, Japan. "Tokyo fashion is becoming popular again."

The last time Tokyo fashion was hot, in the 1980s, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garcons ruled the runways. They embodied Japan's rising economic and cultural prowess. Their clothes were sleek and sophisticated, yet with traditional Edo accents. They shook up the concept of Western fashion, sometimes literally tearing their clothes as a signal of their entrance into the mainstream. In the heyday of Japan's bubble, designers like Miyake had the backing of the country's largest corporations and guaranteed sales from its department-store chains. But since then, in the face of a decade long recession, store chains like Sogo have shut down. The price of clothing has dropped 20 percent. So today's young designers reflect the new social reality: function is more important than flash, and modesty is moral.

Take Masahiro Nakagawa. The 33-year-old designer's belief--or marketing pitch--is that the world must be cleansed of the bubble-era mentality that valued purchasing in overabundance. "The purpose of fashion is to heal us," he says. "There are too many people, too many material goods. Too many stores. Too much in the way of convenience-store values."

That approach is helping Nakagawa & Co. appeal to young consumers. Today's fashion designers have to compete not only with each other but also with foreign apparel behemoths like the Gap. On top of that, they have to fight for yen that are increasingly being spent on i-Mode mobile phones and other popular tech goods. Since they generally don't have the advertising budgets to compete with the big companies, the new designers prefer instead to depict themselves as underground ...