Risa Matsushima

Risa Matsushima is a Japanese designer and atelier leader whose documented career is centred on Y’s. After graduating from Central Saint Martins, she joined Yohji Yamamoto in 2007, entered Y’s planning in 2009 and became the line’s chief creator in 2012 as the brand publicly shifted towards atelier-team direction.

From Spring/Summer 2014 she also led RISMAT by Y’s, giving a named design identity to one strand of the wider studio. A 2018 interview confirms both roles and describes a design team built largely from people who had worked directly with Yohji Yamamoto. No controlling source establishes that Matsushima still held the chief-creator title in 2026.

Matsushima’s work is grounded in the Y’s requirement that clothing remain recognisable through use rather than through a fixed seasonal motif. The studio tests proposals against the line’s practical coats, masculine structures, drape and lived female perspective, treating inheritance as an active design discipline.

RISMAT made her individual approach more legible within that collective system. Its importance lies in delegated atelier authorship: pattern, proportion and daily wear are developed from inside Y’s without turning the main line into the work of one publicly named successor.