Travel has always been fashion’s most seductive accomplice—the great enabler of reinvention, the ultimate aesthetic reset button. This season, Alejandra Alonso Rojas found herself spellbound in Japan. A family trip to Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, and Osaka turned into something deeper than sightseeing; it became a study in precision, a meditation on craftsmanship. “I was just so struck by how well everyone dresses,” she said, still in awe. “The care, the precision, the beauty in everything—even the smallest details.” At one point, standing inside a Kyoto temple, she just… started crying. As one does.

Back in her studio, that sense of quiet, intentional beauty seeped into the collection. She kept it subtle—her signature silk and viscose dresses washed in hues pulled straight from Japan’s landscapes: matcha green, cherry blossom pink, the deep, moody blues of traditional indigo dyes. Shibori, the ancient Japanese tie-dye technique, has been on her radar for seasons, but this time, she fully gave in, letting lavender and blue bleed into one another in dreamlike gradations.

The dresses, as always, led the narrative. The opener? A one-shouldered silk gown with a draped back, brushed with gold—a nod to the gilded accents of Kyoto’s temples. “Gold represents precision, patience, and respect,” she explained. Red, in all its bold luck-and-vitality symbolism, made a striking appearance in a slinky spaghetti-strap slip, the shoulders tied up in soft bows. “I couldn’t get over how joyful all the bows were,” she said. “It just made me smile.”

But it wasn’t all soft-focus romance. A deep-indigo pencil skirt, ruched and gathered into sculptural folds, mirrored the impossibly elegant art of Japanese gift-wrapping. A cropped kimono top, edged in broderie anglaise, was poised but effortless. And then came something unexpected: Rojas’ version of a leather jacket and knotted skirt. A little sharper, a little tougher—a shift for a designer who tends to operate in the realm of diaphanous femininity. Not everyone will come to her for pieces with this kind of edge, but that’s the point. Fashion—at least the kind that lasts—is about evolution. And Rojas, with her feet firmly planted in craftsmanship and her head still in Japan, seems more than ready to push forward.