My Dress-Up Darling

Having wrapped its run on Square Enix's Young Gangan in March 2025 after seven years and fifteen collected volumes, Shinichi Fukuda's My Dress-Up Darling kept making headlines through 2025 as its final English volumes rolled out via Square Enix Manga and Books, the last one landing in October. The series may be the clearest proof yet that fan service and genuinely sophisticated romantic writing can coexist. Its signature costume fitting scenes are rendered with near documentary attention to fabric, makeup, and posture, and the erotic charge comes far more from glances and awkward silences than from explicit nudity.

Western critics, from Anime News Network to numerous specialty podcasts, praised Fukuda for treating cosplay culture with genuine respect rather than as a mere voyeuristic pretext, which turned the book into a publishing event both in Japan and abroad, with the CloverWorks anime adaptation ranking among the most watched of its season. In Italy the manga has been published by Edizioni BD under the J-POP imprint since 2022, with the Italian edition also concluding at the end of 2025. Even though serialization has ended, 2025 was effectively the year the title completed its full international rollout, cementing its status as a modern genre classic, a fixture on best of the decade lists, and more than earning its place near the top of this ranking.