City Lights, Fading

Neon light is more than electricity. It hums with memory. A sign above a ramen shop glowing against the rain, a karaoke bar pulling you in with red and blue flickers, a convenience store that feels safe at 2 a.m.

But neon doesn’t last forever. Tubes dim. Letters fail. The glow that once cut through night begins to fade. What remains is a quiet nostalgia — the afterimage of light that lives longer than the sign itself.

In Tokyo, alleys are still washed in neon, their colors bleeding into puddles. In New York, many signs are disappearing, replaced by digital screens, sharper but colder. What fades feels warmer, more human.

At ichinichi.studio, neon’s fading glow carries into design. A shirt can hold that balance between bright and dim, loud and quiet, present and memory. Imperfection becomes part of the story.

City lights remind us that beauty isn’t only in brightness. Sometimes it lives in the moment just before darkness.