Paradise Kiss will always have a special place in my heart. I first watched the anime when I was about 14 years old, and it sparked my interest in both high fashion and manga, two things that have played a huge part in my creative journey. 

Like Nana, Paradise Kiss is an Ai Yazawa creation and first appeared in manga form in the Japanese magazine Zipper in 1999, followed by an anime in 2005. It tells the coming-of-age story of a straight-laced but sad college-bound young woman who finds her life’s purpose after falling in with a group of rebellious and fabulously stylish fashion design students. 

Paradise Kiss is beautifully animated and full of gorgeous and fearless fashion, all set to a boisterous and unforgettable soundtrack of punk and jpop music. Like many of Yazawa’s stories, Paradise Kiss explores deep and personal themes, from the difficulty of being young and in love, to finding one’s drive in life, to what it means to be an artist in a world that favors the bottom line. 

Table of Contents

Paradise Kiss Fashion

Each of the five main characters not only has a distinctive and well-developed personal style, but are robust and dynamic characters who change and grow in surprising ways over the course of the brief, 12-episode anime. 

Yukari Hayasaka

Yukari (also called Caroline) is the beautiful, intelligent and feisty narrator and protagonist of Parakiss. A high school senior at a prestigious and rigorous academy, Yukari is struggling to prepare for her college entrance exams when she is scouted by Arashi to be Paradise Kiss’s model for the Yazawa school’s senior fashion show.