Paris Fashion Week may well be famous for welcoming designers from all over the world, those from Japan have generally not been able to make the trip this season. If Comme des Garcons, Junya Watanabe and Noir Kei Ninomiya decided to escape the calendar to parade in Tokyo on October 4, others kept their niche in Paris but had to resolve to present their spring-summer 2022 collections by video.
Issey Miyake thus went to shoot a poetic and luminous clip in a convention center in Chiba. “The collection forms a journey through deep seas, explains the artistic director, Satoshi Kondo. We wanted to evoke both the pleasure of silence and the tranquility found at the bottom of the water as well as the joy of discovering and exploring the sea. “ Bright prints that suggest corals, hand-dyed dresses and wide pants, a purple fluid shirt with iridescent mermaid-style buttons, dresses made up of circular yokes pleated like waves… Everything floats and soothes.
The atmosphere is also contemplative and calm at Ujoh and Auralee. At the first, Mitsuru Nishizaki, former of Yohji Yamamoto’s studio, who has become a hope of Japanese fashion, invites for a walk in a vast garden in the city of Nasu. “Since I was grounded, my inspiration came from everyday things. The curves of a flower, the grass blown by the wind, nature… I wanted to reproduce the beauty of these lines in a well-cut everyday wardrobe. ” He draws ample jackets, tunics cut at an angle, stripes and prints like drawings or gouache areas, games of crossings and cords.
At Auralee, it is around Lake Yamanaka, the splendor that borders Mount Fuji, that the viewer is invited to be guided. A misty setting like a dream, suitable for sand wool blazers or blue shirts edged with handmade crochet, knitted coats and cashmere pieces, which the founder, Ryota Iwai, delicately imagines. “I designed the collection thinking of a walk, with no specific place in mind, but wanting to translate this happy feeling to be well outside”, says Ryota Iwai.
Beautiful People’s Hidenori Kumakiri had also started building an outdoor wardrobe for next spring, designed for travel. “But when I understood that coming to Paris would be unthinkable, I refocused it on what I call multiplicity, more flexible pieces”, he says. These, more pop than usual, striped or tiled in tangy hues, are made and undone according to the technical patterns of which the creator has become an ace. A bluish bomber jacket unzips to be worn as a dress once inside out, while a ruched chocolate dress has a concealed integrated jacket. The art of adapting.
The sense of playfulness
The video sent from Tokyo by Anrealage opens with an excerpt from Beautiful, an animated film expected in French theaters at the end of December, by Mamoru Hosoda. The director asked designer Kunihiko Morinaga to design costumes for a stage, and the latter wanted to extend the experience with a collection of stunning geometric dresses and ensembles, similar to avatar outfits.
“I had been thinking for a long time about working on the tension between 2D and 3D, and this animated film gave me the opportunity. I first created each dress from triangles on the computer, he explains, showing us in video the software he uses. I can choose the colors, the dimensions. ”
Then he had each triangle reproduced, in cotton, recycled denim or iridescent material, cut and then assembled like a puzzle. To link physical and digital, parts are also sold in the form of NFT (certificate of authenticity of a virtual object). This cru further demonstrates the rare talent of Kunihiko Morinaga, 41, whose collections are never repeated but remain linked by a sense of playfulness. “Having fun is essential for me, he assures. I think my clothes should be interesting, including for children. “
Only Yohji Yamamoto will have finally managed to organize a physical parade. In the golden salons of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, he slowly circulates women with gray hair in firecrackers, braided or covered with barbed wire, in eternal black, barely soiled with silver paint, white lapels, discreet checks. navy and fir. Arms often bare, open collars, short dresses: the designer explained how to adapt his wardrobe to global warming. Three voluminous floating dresses, whose crinoline skeletons are left visible, close the show, which marks 40 years of Parisian parades for the septuagenarian.
To make the show possible, Yohji Yamamoto and his team agreed to comply with the administrative procedures and the mandatory health quarantine required to enter France. Determined to blow out the candles without interposed screens, but bathed in the human warmth of their faithful.