A few months ago, Anrealage's Kunihiko Morinaga created the costumes for the main character in Mamoru Hosoda's latest anime epic, "Belle" (Ryū to Sobakasu no Hime, literally "The Dragon and the Freckled Princess"), released in July in Japan.
The film received a 14-minute-long standing ovation at its world premiere at the 74th Cannes Film Festival, the longest to be reported on in the festival's history.
Well-known for his "Digimon Adventure – The Movie" (1999) and for "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" (2006), Oscar-nominated animator Hosoda established in 2011 his own animated film production company, Studio Chizu.
For "Belle" Morinaga joined costume designer Daisuke Iga, who worked with Hosoda in his previous films, and flower artist Emi Shinozaki, leader of the creative team "Edenworks".
Anrealage's crystal chandelier face masks and headdresses for Belle were inspired by the brand's S/S 19 collection that featured transparent crystal-shining photochromic beads, but her costumes also referenced the light reactive fabrics employed in the A/W 2018 collection.
"Belle" is the story of a 17-year-old high school girl, Suzu Naito, who, after losing her mother, lives with her father in the countryside of Kochi Prefecture. She loves singing, but she seems to have forsaken this gift after her traumatic loss.
Invited to join the virtual world of "U" by a friend, she creates an alter ego and becomes a diva capable of wowing hundreds of millions of users with her concerts. Yet she will still have to face a menace threatening her dream, discover the identity of a beast and heal it to reconcile her real and digital life.
We have all been living in this dichotomy, suspended between two dimensions during the Coronavirus pandemic and we experienced what it means to be divided between the real and the unreal - or rather digital - worlds.
With the pandemic our lifestyles changed, many of us discovered the pleasures and pains of smartworking and digital classes, and the possibility of buying virtual clothes for ourselves (to wear in Instagram selfies) or skins for our videogame characters. The main character in Hosada's film lives a divided existence, very similar to the one we have lived ourselves in the last 18 months.
Fascinated by this division, when it came to create the S/S 22 collection, Anrealage's Kunihiko Morinaga invited Mamoru Hosoda to create a film that explored it from a fashion point of view.
Entitled "Dimension" the movie takes us on a journey to U, a dimension similar to Yayoi Kusama's infinity rooms where we see Anrealage's clothes being asembled using shiny, colourful and fluorescent polygonal triangles of all sizes, that, flying through the air combine together to form digital polygonal dresses, coats and separates (the triangles in these garments derive from the geometries in the S/S 21 "Home" collection and hint at protecting the wearer) modelled by CG avatars walking on a glass runway floating in the air.
The digital models then become real women and we can finally see the garments coming to life.
Made with proper fabrics, from cotton to vintage denim (see the pale/dark blue dress) and recycled army jackets (the military green/dark green raincoat), used by Morinaga as metaphors to highlight the passage of time and build in this way a bridge between the past and the future, the real dresses with their seamlessly bonded triangles do not look very dissimilar to the digital ones.
The film becomes therefore a continuous interplay between the digital show and the physical runway, without any boundaries.
At times we even watch the show through the phone screens of some of the U users, to create a sort of additional dimension and question the viewer about the authorship of digital contents as well.
The virtual world is an extraordinary two-dimensional spaces; the real world is a three-dimensional everyday environment in which the models move more freely.
Towards the end of the film we see Belle recreating the scene of the film in which she sings her hit "A Million Miles Away" standing on a flying whale covered with loudspeakers.
In this case, though, she is surrounded by colourful butterfly-like triangles rather than petals as it happens in the film and she wears the same dress the last model wears on the runway. As the movie comes to its conclusion we realise that what we watched was not a video on YouTube, but a video on a channel similar to YouTube, but inside the world of U.
Anrealage's designs from this collection transcend the reality just like Belle's costumes: the more striking dresses and separates are made combining hundreds of triangles, silhouettes may be conventional but the shapes are innovative and ingeniously constructed, pointing at Anrealage's passion for patchworked fabrics and effects, but also echoing the art of the Italian Futurists, with their dynamic geometries forming human figures. The collection vaguely references Italian post-modern design in the models' lookbook poses that call to mind the pose assumed by models in Cinzia Ruggeri's early '80s collections.
Wig-maker and head prop designer Tomihiro Kono (who first worked with Morinaga on Anrealage's A/W 21 collection) created the polygonal headpieces in collaboration with a 3D modeling creator, Lee Jaeyong, and he also came up with the flower mask donned by the last model in the show, a reference to the petal scene in the "Belle" movie.
The most colourful masks and head props referenced the costumes of circus clowns, but Kono's main purpose was creating protective helmets or face shields (the idea of protection was clear also in the choice of fabrics for this collection that included Shikibo's anti-bacterial textile Flutect). Kono tried to hint at the dichotomy between digital and real through his head props, creating colourful polygon masks that pointed at robots.
He juxtaposed to them the final flower mask and the half-face masks - the latter inspired by paludaria, that is enclosed containers for terrestrial and aquatic elements in which organisms specific to the biome being simulated are kept - to create contrasts between highly-advanced and technological environments, nature and human beings.
Anrealage attempted the same digital/natural contrast also via the accessories with jewelry and bags with real flowers trapped in resin.
There’s a further digital twist in this collection: Anrelage's fans will be able to break more boundaries between dimensions and between on-screen/off-screen fashion in mid-October when the pieces from this collection will become available as NFTs on the OpenSea marketplace. Bidders will be able to bid cash or cryptocurrencies for the digital pieces.
This is the first digital collection for Anrealage, but you can bet it won't be the last, and this coexistence between digital and real garments represents just one of the paths that fashion may follow in future, that's why with his new designs Morinaga invites people to reconcile with these two dimensions, like Nato does with Belle.
You're warned, though, while this looks terribly Instagrammable, there is a lot of hard work behind it, and a lot of research. So, take this collection as visually striking and therefore extremely Instagrammable, but not as instant nor fast fashion. In a nutshell, it may be partially digital, but it's still craft.
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