Hitomi Okawa

Hitomi Okawa (大川ひとみ) is best known as the founder of MILK. When Hitomi Okawa started as a designer there were not many DC brands. Okawa attended an art university in Kyoto because of a love of drawing that started in elementary school. She used to draw illustrations of girls and make things like paper dolls. At the age of 11, she drew many pictures of the same clothes and changed the patterns (polka dots, checks, flowers). She grew up the daughter of a doctor, in an affluent home where her mother would read magazines like Harper's Bazaar with 1950s and 1960s American fashion. In America which she considered the driving force behind fashion at the time, there was a shift at that time between haute couture and ready to wear. However, she didn't really see that in Japan yet, so she had to draw it and create it herself. She also looked at American fashion catalogs as a child, and cites this study of clothing in magazines and catalogs as her earliest sort of "studying" of fashion.

Her parents wanted her to be a doctor, but by the time she entered university, she had developed an interest in Photography. She said that around this time, Fashion photographers were starting to emerge in Japan, and so she joined the camera club at her university. She was inspired by the work of Yoshihiro Tatsuki.

As of 2015, Hitomi Okawa was still the head designer for both MILK and MILKBOY.