Printed, embroidered or appliqued motifs inspired by the five senses are not so rare in fashion. Decades after decade, eyes and lips, for example, have often been employed in symbolic ways on both garments and accessories.
In the mid-'80s artist, fashion and interior designer Cinzia Ruggeri explored the possibilities of the five senses through garments with lips, noses and eyes.
Some of the designs featured printed and hand-painted elements to stimulate also the touch; others were characterised by prints of eyes, noses and ears that looked slightly surreal, almost evoking the palette and style of Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" (eyes complete with eyelashes also appeared on Ruggeri's pumps - View this photo, third pair from the left, but the way they were displayed at an exhibition in Rome last year, without being cleaned or restored, didn't make them justice, you can see the shoes in this video).
The tribute to the senses was also the main theme behind the video for Ruggeri's A/W 1986-87 collection that included garments that smelled like sulphur, edible earrings and models carrying hand-painted canvas panels of an eye, lips and ear.
This emphasis on the senses recently reappeared in Yohei Ohno's A/W 23 designs. Showcased during Tokyo Fashion Week, the collection mainly revolved around sight and touch.
The former was interpreted as large brooches of an eye used to accessorize jackets and dresses. These decorative elements looked broken and fractured, almost like the fragmented canvases carried by models on Ruggeri's runway.
One dress was instead matched with an oversized tufted cape with a pair of eyes: this piece represented a connection with interior design since it was made with a technique mainly employed to make carpets.
Ohno is actually an interior design fan, so this wasn't the only reference to this discipline: during the collection presentation in a gallery in Shibuya, he got some models posing behind a carpet with an elaborate frame and a pair of cut out legs reminiscent of a statue that could actually be positioned vertically, creating an optically uncanny effect.
Besides, for this collection Ohno also moved from Cassina's Dudet chair designed by Patricia Urquiola (View this photo) and borrowed its distinctive curved silhouette to create padded tubing on mini-skirts in tough cotton that pointed at military wear and on sheepskin heeled pumps designed by Ikue Enomoto.
In this way Ohno established a futuristic and industrial link with interior design that was also an invitation to the touch, as the tubings formed an innovative silhouette, but represented also a soft and comforting motif.
Ohno often adds an eccentric note to his creations and even the designs in this collection that verged towards the casual/street/urban moods and featured graphic prints, were characterised by this approach.
Since he doesn't like T-shirts, for example, he transformed them into handbags, and created a purple print of a fake band's tour poster that was used for bags, turtlenecks and dresses.
In previous collections (A/W 2017-18) Ohno referenced the Bauhaus movement, the automotive industry and furniture design by architect Eileen Gray.
But there is always a marked femininity in all his collections even when Ohno leans more onto the industrial side of things: in previous seasons he printed aeronautical engineering plans onto soft quilted dresses, integrated seat-belt straps in designs that put emphasis on the waistline, and turned industrial aprons into sensual dresses. Ohno also applied dinosaur skeleton tails on elegant flat sandals (View this photo) or decorated tops and skirts with three-dimensional rows of dinosaur horns made with organza (View this photo), playing with contrasts and juxtaposing the brutish nature of prehistoric animals with a vision of a modern, dynamic and ironic woman.
In this collection Ohno continued with this juxtaposition, using light organza for his trousers with a round motif around the calf, vaguely reminiscent of Pierre Cardin's 1970 circle pants (that were originally available in white View this photo or in a selection of bright colours View this photo including orange, an interesting parallelism with Ohno's, that come in the same white/orange palette), and creating kinetic cuffs that coiled around the models' arms, looking like crossovers between an accessory borrowed from a sci-fi film and an orthopaedic brace.
It is exactly in these juxtapositions and contrasts of wearable garments and accessories reinvented from industrial products and with a quirky twist about them, that Ohno excels at.
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