CZMOS Weekly - #001
- CZMOS Redazione
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
The Asian week Italy didn't see
Week of April 25 – May 1, 2026
This week, four signals. Not five. Four, because this column doesn't fill space. Every week counts what actually matters. The thread connecting them: the world is moving toward Asia. The culture industry knows it, the festivals know it, the numbers say it. Italy is looking the other way.
01 - Indonesia has a new girl group. The world already knows. Italy doesn't.
They're called No Na. There are four of them: Esther, Baila, Christy, Shaz, and the video for their single "Work" has clocked over 9.5 million streams on Spotify in two months. The track opens with ceng-ceng, traditional Balinese cymbals, and the choreography sparked a global trend thanks to an acrobatic move by Christy that broke half the internet.
They're not a niche phenomenon. They're signed to 88rising, the label that launched Rich Brian and NIKI, and their name comes from the Indonesian word nona, meaning "miss." Everything in their aesthetic, the costumes, the choreography, the sound, is explicitly Indonesian. Not as decorative folklore, but as an identity statement on a global stage.
The point isn't that No Na are the best in the world. The point is that Southeast Asian pop stopped asking for permission a while ago, and we haven't noticed yet. In Italy, no mainstream media outlet has written a word about them. Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/25ZVvmN0Tm9Os5K42swK8b?si=DCNNzMf1RA-tKL1e4UTtCQ
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nonawav/
02 - Eurovision is coming to Asia. Bangkok is the host city. In Italy, only Eurovision fans wrote about it.
On March 31, 2026, EBU, Voxovation, and S2O Productions announced that the first edition of Eurovision Song Contest Asia will take place on November 14, 2026 in Bangkok.
Ten confirmed countries: South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan.
The news circulated in Italy, but almost exclusively on Eurovision blogs, read as a format curiosity. Nobody read it for what it actually is: the first multinational expansion in seventy years of Eurovision history, and it's going east, not west.
For the Italian cultural press, Eurovision Asia is a footnote. It should be read as a structural signal: Asian pop music is building its own competitive infrastructure, independent from the West.
Bangkok as a creative hub is nothing new for anyone following the sector. For Italian cultural journalism, it's still unknown territory.
03 - Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo 2026: a designer wins the Tokyo Fashion Award with a collection about memory and death.
At Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo A/W 2026, the Tokyo Fashion Award went to Kakan, a brand founded by Hana Kudo, who defines fashion as a form of performance art.
Her collection moves between sculptural latticed pieces and silhouettes in felted fabrics, holding a balance between romanticism and minimalism. The final look, a web-like shawl slowly let fall to the runway floor like the last trace of a vanishing dream, became the moment of the week.
Kudo studied Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins and Fashion Design at Istituto Marangoni. She launched the brand in 2024. She just won the most important award at Tokyo Fashion Week. The Italian fashion press, which has both the resources and the tradition to cover this, hasn't written a single line about it.
Tokyo Fashion Week produces at least three or four designers every season who deserve critical attention in Europe. Not in the trend report sense, but in the sense of a conversation about fashion as language. We keep treating it as a regional appointment. It isn't.
04 - Il "Chinamaxxing" è il fenomeno culturale del momento sui social occidentali.
Among young Americans and Europeans, the fascination with Asia goes well beyond music. From Labubu to the viral Adidas Tang jacket, social media over the past few months has been pulled increasingly toward Chinese aesthetics, in a phenomenon being called "Chinamaxxing."
The term is ugly. The phenomenon is real. This isn't exoticism. It's a generation building its visual identity by drawing from cultural references that, five years ago, were almost invisible in the Western pop imaginary.
The Tang jacket, derived from the Maoist uniform, reinterpreted by Adidas, becoming a global object of desire: that's a story about appropriation, about the direction of cultural flow, about the power of aesthetics as political language.
Something is circulating in Italy, pieces on Labubu, a few articles on the Tang jacket, but product-focused, never analytical. Nobody is examining what it means that Chinese aesthetics have become aspirational in the West, who benefits from it, what gets lost in translation. That piece doesn't exist yet in Italian.
CZMOS Weekly publishes every Sunday. Five signals when there are five. Four, when that's right. czmosmag.com
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