Mention the word “denim“ and people will instantly conjure up in their minds different images.
Some will think about workwear, miners, cowboys and Genoa sailors; others will dream about hippies or film icons, while fashionistas will sadly settle on the latest trends seen on one of the main global runways.
Since the 17th century when it first became popular, this twill-weave fabric has substantially remained the same, while radically changing at the same time.
Levi Strauss may have written the first “denim success story“ in the mid-1850s, followed half a century later by his competitors, The Hudson Overall Company (later on Wrangler) and H.D. Lee Mercantile Company, but this fabric, first employed for workwear, has definitely gone a long way.
The transformations denim went through were helped by music icons and film stars who often used denim garments to channel the "rebel" look.
In just a few decades' time, denim trousers assumed the role of “great leveller“, turning into a garment worn by everybody, from business magnates to politicians, from actors to style icons.
In more recent years we have seen very fashionable collaborations between famous denim producers and glamorous fashion designers and labels, the list is long and comprises the collaborations between Acne and Lanvin, Levi’s and Jean Paul Gaultier and, more recently, Prada's “Made in Japan” jeans, produced in collaboration with Japanese denim manufacturer Dova and featuring hand-painted details next to the internal label.
As the offer dramatically widened (chronicled also by books, but also by entire websites and blogs dedicated to denim), the "great leveller" turned into the "great divider": nowadays you can have a variety of silhouettes and washes, from skinny to baggier, in deep inky blue, black, bleached, clean, dirty, acid-washed or ripped, or you can maybe opt for denim couture, that is designs that combine denim with luxurious fabrics such as silk or painstakingly elaborate embroideries.
Yet, while the choice widened, the rush to ensure denim remained an endlessly fashionable fabric often caused consumer alienation.
I often found myself skipping at various trade fairs the stand of the umpteenth denim garment retailer trying to prove they had done something innovative and never seen before in their latest collection.
Many brands and labels forgot indeed about avant-garde, originality and fun, to focus on more commercial points (yes, I know the essential point of denim is that it is a relatively cheap and popular fabric, but this doesn't mean it must be boring...).
I was therefore glad to see something interesting on the Tokyo Fashion Week's runway. Mint Designs’ Hokuto Katsui and Nao Yagi came up with a very special denim-based collection.
The focus was indeed on the cut and on the shapes - that went from voluminous to deconstructed - and on varying shades of blue, including ink and indigo.
The designers successfully avoided falling into the trap of coming up with just another pair of denim trousers, focusing on coats, vests, dresses and jackets, matching them with jersey tops, shoes in bright or neutral shades and denim headdresses.
The most interesting denim pieces were the trousers and dresses decorated with zigzagging motifs or with silhouettes of little girls dancing, but also the coat dresses in which the coat seams perfectly fused with the dress seams creating an interesting optical illusion and the jackets covered in automatic buttons that could be used to apply random denim pockets, altering in this way the look or the silhouette of the garment.
Overalls were given a tailored twist or used to explore the possibilities offered by different volumes by applying zips that, crisscrossing the designs, allow the wearers to instantly alter the garment at their will.
As a whole the collection was a refreshing take on denim and it's definitely one of the most covetable interpretations of traditional denim for the next Spring/Summer season.
There were a few denim designs also in Fur Fur’s collection (less interesting denim-wise compared to Mint Designs). Designer Koichi Chida mainly focused on colourful and voluminously ample dresses with prints of Snoopy and The Peanuts, but denim made an appearance here and there in dresses with ruffled sleeves and in trousers matched with a shirt and a denim apron.
I must admit that, though the denim-based designs in these collections may not look as revolutionary as Junya Watanabe's pieces for Comme des Garçons's Autumn/Winter 2002-03 collection (remember the jackets that featured denim pieces cut in odd shapes?), they prove that a genuine denim Renaissance is genuinely possible and, at times, it produces even better results than the usual collaborations between denim-based brands and famous fashion designers.
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The Denim collections is very nice and fantastic.It's all very well keeping your top half warm, but your lower half also needs protection against the elements. Invest in quality and you should reap the rewards.
Posted by: workwear clothing | December 20, 2010 at 04:51 AM