Chapter 06, The One We Sent Into the Forest
In March 2025, JAMPROOF presented Chapter 06 「Babayaga Laid An Egg」during Tokyo Fashion Week. The collection unfolded quietly, carrying with it a story that has long been pushed to the margins.
Chapter 06 takes Babayaga as its starting point.
In folklore, Babayaga is often rendered as monstrous, cunning, and fearsome. A witch who lives at the edge of the forest, she is described as both threat and guardian, a keeper of ancient knowledge capable of disrupting order and rewriting rules.
Yet Babayaga is also a substitute figure.
She ages in place of us.
She accepts punishment in place of us.
She becomes the old woman, the exile, the one pushed out of sight.
Her story is a story of exclusion and displacement. A story of being cast away into the forest, and further still, into the depths of the collective unconscious.
Our own fear operates like fire. It burns lived human experience down to caricature, transforming complex realities into grotesque and often comic images. What remains is easier to dismiss, easier to mock, easier to forget.
JAMPROOF approaches Babayaga through the lens of Dubravka Ugrešić’s writing, treating her not as spectacle, but as a vessel for layered female experience. Chapter 06 reflects on womanhood as a shifting terrain. As daughter, mother, and warrior. As rib, carrier, and container. As a body that holds and generates new orders from within.
Roles such as wife, sister, or mother emerge through relation to others.
The witch stands apart.
She is the only archetype whose power is held through herself alone. She is not defined by proximity or obligation. She acts as her own medium, carving paths through fracture and uncertainty.
At Tokyo Fashion Week, Chapter 06 was encountered as a quiet but persistent presence. The collection resisted immediacy, favoring density over display, and allowing its narrative to surface through form, construction, and restraint.
Chapter 06
Tokyo Fashion Week
Tokyo, March 2025