miwa look.1

“miwa” has quite a distinct look, strumming her guitar, with a big smile on her face as she boldly belts out her lyrics. This year marks a decade since her debut. We ask her about everything from fashion and her private life, including certain episodes that have happened during the creative process, as well as how she has grown and changed over her ten-year career as a singer / songwriter, plus a bit about what’s to come.

Going from long to short
Cutting her hair went along together with trying a new style.

Last summer miwa cut her hair short, to accompany a new style change. She was so used to the way she looked that she often still gets surprised when she sees herself now. Her hairstyle is different, so of course she dresses differently now too. She definitely has more of a masculine look now. At the moment she’s got a kind of cool, boyish thing going on. “It’s something totally different from what I had done before, so it was kind of a new challenge for me to try to pull off this new look. I guess it has a kind of fresh new appeal. For the second cut, I liked the denim item. Denim isn’t always just about jeans, in this case it was a cute dress! ”

This summer she wants to try some longer sleeve items, like a maxi dress or a medium-sleeve shirt. “I’m kind of short, so I’ve always avoided long sleeve things, but now that my hair is short, I think it should balance out nicely. So yeah, this summer I’m definitely going to try out some long-sleeved things.”

“miwa” has that look that would make you think she’s into bright colors, and indeed she does. “It depends on how I’m feeling or the item itself, but I like yellow, even for my nails! I even have a color that fits the Onitsuka Tiger look, so I usually have something in my wardrobe with some yellow on it, and my nails are yellow too, so that’s my color for this summer.”

Her main point of concern at the moment
Is the small vegetable garden that she’s learning to grow!

“miwa” has a full schedule of making music and touring all over the country. So then, what about her private life? We asked her about how she spends her days off and what she’s into. “I see my friends, we have a chat, I’ll read a book. I’ll watch a movie. I do a lot of shopping. I’m into gardening, I don’t know if you could call it my main hobby, but it all started a couple years ago with me trying to grow a little mint. This year I’m trying some sweet basil, baby leaf lettuce, and some other things on the veranda at home. It’s what I’m into the most right now.”

While on tour, she stopped at a store to pick up some mint seeds, and that led her to realize that she could just grow her own, so that’s how it started. In addition to the fun of growing her own little garden, she can also use the mint, baby leaf lettuce and other stuff in her cooking.

“Baby leaf lettuce takes about thirty days to grow. They’re mixed with lettuce, red-leaved chicory, dandelions, and all kinds of seeds, and arugula grows the fastest. Once you start checking out the new sprouts, you push them away and find other new sprouts underneath. I think you have to kind of thin it out to make room for new growth, but I’m not sure how much they grow… When I checked it out, I guess if you grow them in a planter they can get pretty thick… I’ve heard you can let them grow pretty thick, but then they need sunlight to grow, so you have to keep it pretty well trimmed from what I hear. I wish someone would just tell me how to do it! Every day it’s kind of a process of trial and error for me.”

Although she says she’s having some difficulty, her expression seems to say that it’s all about finding the right balance between her music and her interests, and making it work from day to day.

→In the August issue of LOOK.2, miwa tells us about her ten years in the music business, but we also dig a little deeper, so get set to find out more!

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DIRECTION : Shinsuke Nozaka
PHOTO : Masato Moriyama (TRIVAL)
STYLIST : Kosei Matsuda (SIGNO)
HAIR MAKE : Atsushi Sasaki (GLUECHU)
TEXT : Mai Okuhara