Unsettling reflections

Fuchi is introduced as a fashion model, someone who ostensibly embodies the industry’s most prized traits. She is exceptionally tall, thin, and possesses a striking facial structure, the features typically celebrated in high fashion. However, Ito distorts each of these attributes just enough to expose their underlying instability. Her height is no longer statuesque but skeletal and looming. Her high cheekbones stretch into an elongated, almost horse-like face. Most strikingly, her “dazzling smile” is transformed into a grotesque display of jagged, needle-sharp teeth.

By using the very language of beauty—height, bone structure, elegance and pushing it into the realm of horror, Ito collapses the boundary between what is considered “exotic beauty” and what is perceived as deformity. The difference, he implies, is not inherent but perceptual. It exists only in the eye of the beholder, shaped by cultural trends and aesthetic conditioning.

Fuchi’s teeth, in particular, function as a powerful symbol. In the fashion world, a captivating smile is a tool of charm and desirability. In Fuchi, this same feature becomes a literal instrument of consumption. She does not merely attract attention, she devours. This transformation suggests that the beauty industry itself operates through a similar logic: it consumes individuality, demanding conformity to an ever-shifting and often unattainable ideal.

Fashion agencies, photographers, and media function as authorities that instruct others on what to admire, subtly overriding individual instinct. The eye does not simply see, it is trained. And once that training takes hold, even the grotesque can be reframed as desirable.

Fuchi, then, becomes the logical endpoint of the system already implied in her design. Just as her smile transforms from a symbol of charm into an instrument of consumption, so too does the idea of beauty shift from a personal response into a prescribed standard. People do not recognize her as beautiful because she is, they recognize her as such because they have been told to.