Rika Azechi (LICA)

Rika Azechi, known professionally as LICA, is a Japanese fashion designer born in 1967 in Osaka Prefecture and co-founder of 20471120. Unlike Masahiro Nakagawa, she entered fashion through formal technical training, attending a vocational fashion college before working for an established apparel manufacturer in Kobe. That experience gave the future partnership a practical foundation in garment construction, pattern development and the requirements of commercial production.

LICA and Nakagawa established Bellissima in Osaka in 1992. Their early operation was small and self-financed, moving through modest retail and work spaces before the label gained wider attention through local shows. When a trademark dispute forced a change of name in 1994, the same partnership continued as 20471120. Nakagawa supplied many of the house’s large concepts and characters; LICA translated those ideas into wearable forms. Museum holdings credit both designers, reflecting joint authorship instead of a separation between creative director and anonymous technical staff.

The pair entered the Tokyo Collection with Spring/Summer 1995 and opened a Jingumae store later that year. As 20471120 expanded, LICA worked inside a system that combined fashion construction with performance, manga-derived imagery and mass entertainment. HYOMA merchandise and spectacular ticketed shows broadened the audience, while the garments retained the technical demands of a rapidly growing designer label. Nakagawa and LICA received the Mainichi Fashion Grand Prix Newcomer Award together in 1998.

LICA also participated in the house’s shift towards reuse and alternative formats. Tokyo Recycle Project began while 20471120 was still active and entered the Spring/Summer 2000 Tokyo Collection before later iterations moved increasingly into Nakagawa Sochi’s museum practice. Contemporary material continued to identify LICA as a 20471120 designer into the early 2000s, including exhibition and product activity after the first recycle experiments.

Regular activity with Nakagawa under 20471120 was suspended in 2006. LICA’s career then moved through separate fashion roles, including Cacharel, Baby Jane Cacharel and zechia, which she co-launched with Nakagawa before continuing as her own current fashion practice. Those appointments form a later chapter in her career and do not turn 20471120 into an active post-2006 house.

LICA’s contribution to 20471120 was grounded in the conversion of narrative into clothing. Her technical education and commercial experience gave the partnership a means to realise Nakagawa’s more speculative ideas without reducing them to costume. Pattern, fabrication and production had to make character culture, transformation and surreal imagery function on actual bodies and within the demands of a fast-growing independent label.

This role required flexibility because the house resisted a stable category system. A collection could draw on digital pattern, manga, toy culture or large performance structures; another could shift towards reuse and the emotional history of existing clothing. LICA’s work held those changes together at garment level, allowing 20471120 to move across highly different visual registers without losing its practical relationship to fashion.

The recycle period made technical judgement even more important. Donated clothes arrived as finished objects with their own construction, wear and personal meaning. Rebuilding them required reading what could be cut, retained, layered or merged while preserving the singularity of the original garment. This moved design away from standardised production and towards responsive reconstruction.

Her later career continued the clothing side of the partnership after 20471120 was suspended. Work with Cacharel, Baby Jane Cacharel and zechia kept LICA inside fashion while Nakagawa moved further into independent art. The divergence makes her earlier role especially clear: 20471120 depended on the meeting of Nakagawa’s world-building and LICA’s sustained practice of making those worlds wearable.