The scene backstage at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan had all the telltale signs of fashion show prep.
On an afternoon in mid-May, dozens of people hummed around, getting the girls into first looks.
Pat McGrath’s team was on makeup, painting faces with elaborate clownish and punk expressions. Dennis Lanni was on hair, shellacking a split mohawk into two stiff vertical blades.
Stephen Jones had created elaborate hats, including a blue Marie Antoinette-inspired headpiece made with white ostrich feathers. Mei Kawajiri was on nails, applying strawberry-themed tips that needed to be short and relatively simple.
At the centre of it all was Olympia Le-Tan, the creative director.
Dressed in a black-and-white ensemble of Comme Des Garcons, Alaïa and Nike Rifts, with a watch belonging to her father, illustrator Pierre Le-Tan, strung round her neck Flavor Flav-style, she looked like a fashion referee, surveying the racks of clothes to ensure every look was up to code.
Something was missing. A mini petticoat.
“We need it to make Delirious Dolly’s skirt fan out,” Olympia said.
A few hours later, Delirious Dolly and her skirt were lying flat out on the ballroom floor between a runway and a wrestling ring.
She had been levelled by a moonsault — a backflip off the ropes, in wrestling parlance – delivered by a woman going by the name Supersonic, wearing a ruffled latex mask with pig ears.
A sold-out crowd, which included model Lila Moss and photographers Gray Sorrenti and Craig McDean, looked on and cheered.
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It wasn’t technically a fashion show. It was more like fashion wrestling. And it’s called Sukeban.
Fashion history is littered with designers who left the brands they founded and lost the rights to their name when business partnerships soured.
Some, like Zac Posen, go on to design for mass retailers. Some change their name. Herve Leger became Herve Leroux.
But only one, Olympia Le-Tan, has co-founded a Japanese women’s wrestling league.
“I never saw this happening,” Olympia said over cake and coconut water at her Lower East Side apartment a week after the Hammerstein Ballroom match.
“I was never a wrestling fan. Even now, I’m not a fan of wrestling. I’m a fan of our wrestlers.”
Sukeban is the brainchild of Olympia and her partners, Ian Fried and Alex Detrick, her brother-in-law.
Envisioned as a hybrid of fashion, beauty, manga, anime and women’s sports, the league follows all the tropes of classic professional wrestling. There are characters, storylines, vicious rivalries.
Named for the Japanese girl gangs of the 1960s and 1970s, Sukeban, in Olympia’s hands, has experienced a glow-up to the standard of high-fashion editorial.
There’s the hair, the makeup, the costumes and the championship belt designed by Marc Newson.
The league’s inaugural fight took place in September 2023 in New York City. Sukeban has since travelled to London, Miami, Berlin and the Anime Expo in Los Angeles, where it will return in early July.
The production values have escalated along the way.
The May fight in New York City was Sukeban’s most ambitious yet. Production was handled by La Mode en Images, which mounts fashion shows for Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga and Loewe.
Paris is on the list, and the league hopes to eventually go to Tokyo, where the stakes are considerably higher.
“We’ve been trepidatious because they have such a rich history of wrestling in Japan,” Fried said.
The plot twist in Olympia’s story is not as far-fetched as one would imagine.
Olympia, 48, was born in London and raised in Paris by her French Vietnamese father and English mother. She got her start in fashion in the 1990s when Gilles Dufour, Karl Lagerfeld’s studio director for 15 years, hired her at Chanel.
Dufour, a collector of Pierre Le-Tan’s work, met Olympia as she drew in her parents’ kitchen.
She recalled that he said: “What are you doing? Oh, do you draw? Do you want to work in fashion?”
Olympia made her name with a line of charmingly hand-embroidered book clutches made to look like the covers of such titles as Lolita and Moby-Dick.
She left the company in 2018 amid an acrimonious split with the controlling shareholder and CEO, who continues to run the business (Olympia is currently in litigation to reclaim rights to her name).
She moved to New York City to work for Marc Jacobs, freelanced around a bit and developed a short-lived home goods line.
Then in 2021, Detrick called with a proposal: Did she want to design costumes for a wrestling league?
Initially, Olympia saw the venture as a great way to ruin her reputation.
“I can’t suddenly go from Marc Jacobs to wrestling,” she said.
But she surveyed friends in Japan, where she had lived and worked as a DJ.
“They were like, ‘No, actually you could make it cool, and then it would be genius,’” she said.
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Olympia and her partners set about building the world of Sukeban.
First, they needed a story. The league is divided into smaller girl gangs based on neighbourhoods in Tokyo, each with its own aesthetic, identity and subculture.
The Dangerous Liaisons, who take after the neighbourhood Ginza, are posh and evil. The Harajuku Stars are kawaii good girls.
The Cherrybomb Girls, a la Shibuya, represent a sporty, hip-hop club scene. The Vandals are punk outcasts and based in Shinjuku.
Nakano Broadway, a mall in the Nakano neighborhood devoted to otaku, or highly specific hobbies, spawned the Tokyo Toys. Delirious Dolly, a sort of broken Dorothy from The Wizard Of Oz, is a member.
Also essential to starting a Japanese women’s wrestling league: Japanese wrestlers.
Fried recruited Keiko Aoki, aka Bull Nakano, a mainstay villain of All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling in the 1980s and 1990s, as Sukeban’s commissioner.
Nakano advised on strategy and choreography. Casting the highest calibre of pro wrestlers who were also willing to perform suplexes and pile drivers in pink latex Sailor Moon garb was not a problem.
Many were lured by the promise of travel.
Sukeban merch is already sold at the fights. But Olympia has a vision for a fashion line derived from the wrestlers’ costumes.
“The dream is to open a dojo shop in Tokyo with a ring in the middle where you can watch the wrestlers training,” she said.
“There’d be a little coffee shop there, too, with Sukeban-themed cakes and mini-collections for each stable – one goth, one punk, one kawaii.”
It doesn’t sound so different from designing a collection, having a runway show and sending the merch to a store.
“Well, there’s the athletes,” Olympia said. “They’re wearing it and performing it. They’re the expression of it.” – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
