Yesterday's post closed hoping that young people like Thebe Magugu, winner of the Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy's LVMH Prize, will bring positive changes to how fashion relates to culture and history. Yet Magugu is not the only one who brings hope to the scene: among the award finalists there was indeed also Anrealage's Kunihiko Morinaga.
A believer in science and technology and a designer keen on experimenting with lights and shadows and volumes and proportions, for his presentation at the LVMH Prize Morinaga didn't forget his photosensitive fabrics and photonic-crystal fibers, but reshifted his attention on nature and on the possibility of reinventing the concept of sustainable fashion.
Morinaga set on studying garments made with biodegradable polyester thread and recycled polyester thread (not biodegradable) and designed a jacket, a dress and a coat. He then buried them in soil for one month, watering them as if they were plants and keeping them at a temperature of 70°C (it is worth remembering that burying clothes to then dig them out and see what happened to them may not be a new practice in the history of fashion, but Morinaga is the first designer who has worked with biodegradable threads).
The designer monitored the garments daily to see how they started decomposing and to keep track of the work of bacteria eating the polyester threads and creating a new pattern. This vintage process created tartan checks, block checks and lace-like floral patterns.
Morinaga tells us that, rather than throwing away his designs, we should let these pieces redesign themselves with the help of bacteria that add to the garments a degree of uncontrollable creation.
Apart from these garments, Morinaga also created for the LVMH presentation photochromic garments that change colour with sunlight and a reflective ensemble, comprising a spherical jacket and shirt made with retroreflective and spectroscopic technology.
Anrealage's photochromic garments are made with a special pigment that changes color by sunlight. In the past the brand mainly focused on pastel colours, but new experiments allowed Morinaga to allow the reaction to evolve, producing a dark-coloured military khaki.
If you visit the official Instagram page of the brand you will see some of these designs that can mutate their colour, from a white ensemble turning almost black to an Argyle pattern in colour that materialises on a white cardigan.
The globe garment is instead based on Anrealage's S/S 09 collection that, as you may remember, was inspired by basic geometric forms such as a cube, a sphere and a pyramid.
That collection revolved around the possibility of modelling a garment over a three-dimensional shape and then applying that garment to the human body to see what it would look like.
In the case of this specific garment for the LVMH presentation, the jacket and shirt recreate the earth, and when the designs are exposed to light, a rainbow-colored world map appears.
In addition to these designs, the presentation also featured items in the brand's trademark patchwork made with 2,000 Tango chirimen silk crepe wastes.
While it is obvious that not all the garments included in this presentation could be immediately produced at affordable prices, they provide us with a glimpse of a very different sustainable and clever future that will allow us to combine more than one look in one garment. This future needs time to be developed, though, and, hopefully, there will be designers out there like Morinaga willing to concentrate on time-consuming researches that may bring genuine innovations to the industry.
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