There were a variety of inspirations in Kenzo's A/W 23 menswear collection, showcased last week in Paris. Nigo, the house's creative director, collided Japanese tailoring with English vibes and workwear with occasional punk twists.
A traditional Japanese stitching technique - sashiko - consisting in a running stitch used to impart warmth and strength to clothes, was used to transform traditional garments such as a kimono into a modern piece or to give a samurai allure to a quilted vest.
Designs characterized by a broken striped pattern in brown/beige, charcoal/grey and navy/light blue reintroduced instead dazzle camouflage among the trendy patterns for the next season.
Dazzle camouflage was pioneered by British naval officer Norman Wilkinson during WWI to halt German U-Boats from destroying the British fleet.
The odd patterns on the battleships, with their bold and violently contrasting colours including green, yellow, pink, purple, blue and black, were based on the theory that they would make it harder to target them (after all, the same happens with stripes on a zebra and spots on a cheetah). Dazzle wasn't indeed meant to not hide a ship, but to disrupt its outline.
To be torpedoed, a ship had to be located, then heading and speed had to be determined. The torpedo was then fired not at the ship, but at the spot the ship would be when the torpedo made contact.
Dazzle made the calculation regarding the size, shape, speed, or heading of a ship impossible, prompting a submariner's to miss the target by multiple degrees. To make things even more difficult, no two ships were painted alike so that the Germans would have nothing to latch onto as a template for the patterns on the ships. The success of early dazzle patterns led to their adoption by many of the Allied ships, but by WWII, this type of camouflage became less effective because of inventions like radars and range finders.
Dazzle patterns often come back in fashion, for one main reason: they are as eye catching as stripes, but fashion is enthralled by the rationale behind the WWI pattern - reduced visibility and disruption.
A garment with a dazzle pattern makes you indeed visible, but also confounds the eye of the viewer: on Kenzo's runway there was indeed a design in a dazzle pattern that tricked the eye as it looked like a coat from a distance, but, close up, revealed itself as a hybrid construction with the upper part looking like a combination of a jacket and a waistcoat (it also evoked in some ways the early fashion experiments of the Italian Futurists).
If you like this inspiration you can check out paintings by Edward Wadsworth, who supervised dazzle camouflage painting in the war, and created a series of canvases after the war based on his dazzle work on ships; Arthur Lismer who employed dazzle ships in some of his wartime compositions (the palette on Kenzo's runway may have been lifted from Lismer's 1919 painting "Olympic with Returned Soldiers) and Burnell Poole, who featured in his paintings United States Navy ships in dazzle camouflage at sea.
There are also a plenty of camouflage color and design templates for U.S. Navy Commissioned Ships, U.S. Merchant Ships and British Ships at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Some of them feature unique colour schemes and pattern layouts (in this Kenzo's collection Nigo was also inspired by The Beatles and some of the dazzle patterns from the National Archives pre-date and evoke the aesthetics and the palette of St. Pepper's).
For what regards the sashiko pattern, this may be turning into a trend with some architectural twists about it: there was indeed a similar technique in Adidas' Y-3 line, designed in collaboration with Yohji Yamamoto's team.
Quilted jackets, technical vests, trousers, scarves and skirts with functional drawstrings to restyle them in accordance with the wearer's tastes, were enlivened by quilted motifs forming dynamic geometries.
Architecturally, they called to mind the slab roof composed of prefabricated X-shaped segments creating a repetitive pattern in the Church in Baranzate di Bollate, designed by architects Angelo Mangiarotti and Bruno Morassutti and with structures by Aldo Favini.
More geometries informed Issey Miyake's Homme Plissé collection: entitled "Upon a Simplex," the collection had a subtitle that could be the an architectural essay, "An investigation of basic geometry, developing into elaborate curved planes, in forms of their very structure."
The brand’s design team highlighted in the show notes that the collection looked at triangles and at other basic geometric elements, but transformed them into complex forms integrated into the garment construction.
Some of the prints called to mind images of the brutal yet ethereal walkways integrated into Lina Bo Bardi's Centro de Lazer Fábrica da Pompéia (Pompéia Factory Leisure Centre; better known as SESC Pompéia), in São Paulo.
But there were also prints based on the triangles forming R. Buckminster Fuller's spherical structures.
In this case, while the prints were flat, the accordion-like nature of the garments transformed their fixed rigidity into a fluid effect flowing on the body and creating, as models walked on the runway, the illusion of a soft spherical structure cocooning the body.
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