serial experiments lain Returns to Harajuku With “let’s all love lain”

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Few anime from the late 1990s feel as strangely suited to 2026 as serial experiments lain.

SEVESKIG's new “let's all love lain” project opens September 2 with two connected Tokyo experiences: a popup exhibition at Laforet Harajuku and a special cinema screening program in Ikebukuro.

Back Into the Wired

The Laforet Harajuku exhibition runs through September 8 on the fifth floor at MAKE THE STAGE. Admission is free, and the project includes SEVESKIG collaboration items and an exhibition reinterpretation of lain's visual and conceptual world.

At Ikebukuro HUMAX Cinemas, all 13 TV episodes are being shown through September 9 as part of the same project.

Why lain Still Feels Contemporary

serial experiments lain first appeared in 1998 as a multimedia project spanning anime, games and publishing.

Its story explored unstable boundaries between physical reality and a networked world, along with changing forms of human connection.

That context makes its return especially striking now. Social networks, AI-generated identities and always-connected online life have turned ideas that once felt experimental into ordinary parts of daily life.

Harajuku also gives the project a fitting physical setting: fashion, youth culture and digital fandom all meet in the same neighborhood.

What To Know

For longtime fans, this is both merchandise and a rare chance to revisit the entire anime in a cinema. For newer audiences, it is an opportunity to discover why a 1998 work still appears in conversations about internet culture.

Harajuku has repeatedly served as a meeting point between fashion and pop culture. A collaboration between an experimental anime and a fashion label fits that tradition particularly well.

What Fans Are Saying

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『serial experiments lain』のイベントが原宿で始まりました。