Chiyuki has always dreamed on being a supermodel who walks the runways of Paris and other top-level fashion shows and it seems like she has everything going for her. She’s slim, attractive but not in a way that would overwhelm the garments, and her father even owns a fashion company/modeling agency. But alas, her height is far too short to fit into the clothes made by most runway designers. Chiyuki thinks that she may have found a way around this, by recruiting her talented but overlooked classmate Ikuto to make fashionable clothing for her to model instead, but it seems like she’s launched his career in the process instead of her own?!
Smile Down the Runway doesn’t pull a bait-and-switch per say but it’s a little odd that the story starts from Chiyuki’s perspective but by chapter two she’s practically a side character with Ikuto taking center stage in almost all instances thereafter. I can completely imagine a revamped chapter one which is all from Ikuto’s point of view and yes it wouldn’t hit so hard in points, but the points it wouldn’t “work” as well for would be Chiyuki’s story, which clearly isn’t the main story anyway. After two volumes I feel fairly confident in saying that this story isn’t one with two, co-equal leads (which would have made sense why the story switched viewpoints after a couple of chapters) but a story with Ikuto in the lead and Chiyuki as an important supporting character/means to get his story going/love interest (there isn’t much in the way of ship-teasing yet between the two characters but this isn’t my first manga, I know how stories with a boy and a girl go). I didn’t realize at first that this series ran in the boy’s magazine Weekly Shonen Magazine, which makes the focus on fashion a bit odd, but I suppose that also explains why Ikuto is the lead instead of Chiyuki.
It’s probably better that Smile Down the Runway is focusing on Ikuto more than Chiyuki since it seems like manga-ka Kotoba Inoya doesn’t actually know where to take Chiyuki’s story and like they wrote themselves into a corner in the first chapter. Within the first chapter we see that Chiyuki can get modeling gigs, she has the posing sense and body type to work well for many different kinds of shoots and the kind of connections to get her into more doors, but that’s it. I’m guessing Inoya never watched America’s Next Top Model (excuse me, Asia’s Next Top Model) to get more ideas for future plots, although one could argue that Chiyuki herself put herself in a corner.
We see Chiyuki talking over and over about wanting to model on the catwalks of Paris but never about other modeling gigs and, as someone who has assisted on fashion photoshoots, I can say that you do want a bit of variety in models so Chiyuki could certainly have gotten jobs modeling for magazines (and it’s a bit odd that if she had this “natural talent” for modeling that her parents didn’t have her do anything as a kid, I had friends who did some modeling work very occasionally as elementary and middle schoolers). But again, I think this all stems from Inoya not planning out Chiyuki’s arc clearly enough to keep her as a main character, or simply doing enough research into what a model’s life is actually like, and frankly it’s almost impressive that Inoya managed to write themselves into a box in the very first chapter.
While Inoya does seem to have more ideas for plots and obstacles around Ikuto’s journey I’m not sure they actually know that much about the world of fashion design either! There were just enough odd moments in the fashion show Ikuto ends up assisting with in volumes one and two that made the whole little arc feel rather contrived. One moment that completely threw me out of the story was when the designer Ikuto was working with admits that he can’t sew at all, he apparently “specialized in designing” and therefore doesn’t know how to sew at all and just, what?
On the one hand, this may be a Japanese education vs American education thing since I’m fairly sure that American fashion design college students learn hands-on construction in addition to everything else (especially since, presumably, they’re having to make at least some of their designs personally) and perhaps it’s a totally different set-up in Japan. On the other hand however, I quite literally learned how to sew when I was 3 and I distinctly remember being baffled in high school when one boy said he didn’t know how to sew the button back onto his pants and didn’t care to learn. This small moment had a huge impact on the plot, a “for want of a nail [needle]” situation, and it doesn’t speak well to Smile’s future arcs if the set-up for this one is so exceedingly flimsy.
For those watching the anime, these first two volumes cover through episode three which makes for rather fast pacing and I’m not sure why. The anime has cut some scenes, like one showcasing Ikuto’s practically savant powers when it comes to pattern drafting, and condensed some others so much that I felt like any heft to those scenes were lost (like the young reporter’s internal recollection of why she doesn’t like fashion and yet is blown away by Ikuto’s dress). I’ve often said that the first medium I encounter a story in tends to be my favorite but this is the unusual case where I was lukewarm on the manga but actively annoyed by the anime! In the manga the characters just feel a bit less annoying and it’s easier to breeze past any events that showcase Inoya’s lack of knowledge about any of this.
I went into this series expecting something like Paradise Kiss or Complex Age, two series where the creators at the very least knew how to bluff their way through technical bits, and came out just feeling rather annoyed instead.