As seen in a few previous posts this week there have been attempts on the menswear runways to comment about some of the main issues currently worrying our society.
Though Maison Kitsuné wasn't trying to make a literal comment about wars and violence, its collection and lookbook accompanying it moved from a poetical animated film - historical drama The Wind Rises, written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and animated by Studio Ghibli - that features enough metaphors about dreams, beauty and the cruelty of this world to make us want to sit and ponder for a while, leaving behind the relentlessly fast world of fashion.
The film homages Jiro Horikoshi, designer of the Mitsubishi A5M fighter aircraft and of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, used by the Empire of Japan during World War II, and his friend Kiro Honjo (who designed the Mitsubishi G3M).
In the movie Jiro is portrayed as a dreamer and often sees in his most extraordinary visions a very personal hero, Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Battista Caproni, who inspires him to become an aeronautical engineering.
Jiro eventually manages to create state-of-the-art planes, but, his perfect designs are destined to destruction, after all, as Caproni warns him in a vision, planes are beautiful dreams that can easily become tools of death in the hands of cruel mankind.
The film was evoked in a few elements featured in Maison Kitsuné's new collection: designers Gildas Loaëc and Masaya Kuroki called it "Love Rises" and tried to borrow its main mood from the romantic parts of this drama and from Jiro's visions. Details from aviation and military uniforms were therefore combined with some of the brightest shades of the film, though the collection also featured tops with World War II fighter planes, outerwear with images of Mount Fuji and snow-capped mountains, and the red rising sun on a jumper and shoes as well.
A sky-blue sweater and socks with plane motifs also evoked the stylised plane/cross motif on Jiro's childhood kimono, while the images of the lookbook with a model climbing fake rocks were directly taken from the mountain holiday that allows Jiro to meet again with Naoko (though her place at the canvas is taken by a male model painting on a fake green hill....).
The clothes were wearable, though at times you wished the designers had been a little bit more thought-provoking and maybe emphasised Horikoshi's quote that convinced Miyazaki to do a film about this story - "All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful".
Interestingly enough, the design due ended up being the victims of their own inspiration: the lookbook images with the Japanese military flag, which features red rays emanating from the rising sun and is considered by many as a sign of aggression and imperialism, were actually removed after the fashion house received negative feedback online. Somehow, you can almost hear the designers claiming they were just trying to make something beautiful in Horikoshi's style, but their message was misunderstood and corrupted.
Rather than being just a biopic The Wind Rises reflects indeed on the way human beings easily corrupt beauty. Fashion does the same and quite often simply destroys creativity and the will to experiment and research in the name of capitalism.
There are instead different lessons to be learnt from this film that could be easly applied to fashion: Caproni reminds Jiro in one vision that "Engineers turn dreams into reality," and that "the important thing for an engineer is the inspiration".
Jiro is worried and remarks about the fact that Japan seems backwards when it comes to aviation, but Caproni reassures him that "Inspiration unlocks the future. Technology will catch up." Put the word "fashion designer" in the place of "engineer" and you could come up with a great message for the entire industry - inspiration is definitely the key to the future.
Yet it's the deeper meaning of the film that remains the most important one: the absence of genuine beauty in today's world is driving us towards a barbaric dark age. The ghosts and shadows of beautiful things etched in our collective memories should help us getting on with our lives, in a nutshell, as Paul Valéry's quote from Le Cimetière Marin (The Graveyard By The Sea) states at the beginning of the film, "Le vent se lève!... Il faut tenter de vivre" - "The wind rises!... We must try to live!"
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments