A former pattern cutter at Comme des Garçons, when he started his brand Kei Ninomiya pledged to use only black in his collections and find alternative solutions to traditional stitching techniques.
You may argue he didn't keep to his promises as, season after season, he had added some splashes of colours to his signature construction techniques. Yet, in his universe, there are many interpretations of the black shade and a myriad construction solutions.
For example, he introduced in his S/S 22 collection (launched during Paris Fashion Week with a digital presentation from Comme des Garçons headquarters) a beige shade and an allover logo print in black and white (an attempt at coming up with a branded piece for logo fans) for sheer shirts and densely packed ruffled and apron dresses, highlighting that his passion for noir, is expressed in this collection not through solid colours, but through shadows.
Hence the beige rigid tutus sticking out to the side or forming his signature geodesic domes, or explosions of fabrics resembling desert rose conglomerates, pointing at the fragile Vs strong dichotomy.
Ninomiya proceeded to create shadows by twisting, braiding, cutting and folding fabrics and at times he created sinuous volumes by anchoring fabric to wires and frames.
Bows appeared on Comme des Garçons' runway as prints, ribbons here formed instead soft harnesses-like structures finished off with bows, again a juxtaposition, a dichotomy between soft materials and hard structures reminiscent of cages.
Like Rei Kawakubo, Ninomiya developed a passion for reinventing collection after collection the biker jacket.
In this collection he reinterpreted it as a sort of tutu-meets-corset configuration and then in a natural material, woven hemp rope, reducing it to a corset from which tentacles of twisted braids of rope elongated towards the shoulders, the neck and legs, or in a cropped jacket elongated by braided tentacles of rope.
As the title of the collection was "Nuances", beige was reinterpreted as ivory, sand, nude and cappuccino, with metallics added in gold ruffled dresses.
Tulle ruffles were a theme and they were used to create cocooning shapes reminiscent of the shapeshifting Barbapapas, while Ninomiya also experimented with fluffy tutus made with jute fringes.
There were also bulbous constructions that seemed to point at science rather than architecture and, for their spherical shape with protruding spikes, also seemed to call to mind the molecular structure of Coronavirus.
Was that intentional? Maybe, after all the designer claimed on his Instagram page, "I wanted to express the ephemeral strength and beauty of things that are present around us although we cannot see them clearly," and while Covid-19 is something terrifying, it is around us and its molecular structure, invisible to our eyes, remains visually intriguing.
Among the visually intriguing yet almost invisible pieces Ninomiya designed there were also the final bodysuits with structures made of metallic wires evoking architectural constructions or constellations.
Some of the designs in this collection also evoked the costumes for Oskar Schlemmer's Triadische Ballet. Who knows, maybe in future we may expect costumes for ballets from Ninomiya. You can bet he would excel at that, turning something like an ordinary tutu into an extraordinary piece suspended between science and architecture.
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