It is often the case that the labels favoured by street kids do not showcase their collections during Tokyo Fashion Week. This year, though, something changed and some Japanese labels appreciated by alternative fashion fans, such as Pillings by Ryota Murakami, were part of the main calendar.
Japan relaxed the Covid-19 guidelines regarding face masks last week, a decision that coincided with the fashion week, and that gave the event a renewed impulse.
A graduate of Coconogacco and a designer at writtenafterwards, pre-Covid Murakami formed a design duo with his mother. After 2020, he renamed his brand from Ryotamurakami to Pillings, but maintained the focus on experimental knitwear (trying to bridge contemporary fashion trends with Japanese handicrafts he also launched a knit school with Keiko Okamoto from Atelier K'sK).
In the previous show presentation (A/W 22) Murakami hung a huge piano upside down from the ceiling, while models in knitted designs covered in cute ants or oversized insects and lobsters, walked on the runway. In that case the ants and insects (View this photo) were used as hints at being laborious, disciplined and at adapting to society.
But Murakami doesn't seem to conform to a cookie-cutter culture: fascinated by this dichotomy between the rules imposed on each of us by society and individual freedom, Murakami usually designs clothes for people who do not want to conform and who express their dissent through eccentric pieces or through subtle details.
During the A/W 23 show presentation everything was tinged with melancholy: the runway was immersed in the dark with multiple streetlights that lit when the models passed under them. The models with their wet hair and pale faces looked cold and seemed to hold together their knits, almost hugging themselves.
The gesture was not done out of modesty but was caused by a functional trick: the models were indeed putting their hands in bizarrely misplaced and misaligned pockets, as a gesture of protection from adversities.
For Murakami putting your hands in your pockets means indeed feeling safe, almost relieved, and that was the main purpose of his designs, offering protection and a refuge from anxiety.
Yet, by misplacing the pockets and putting them around the chest or at the sides, Murakami also shifted the silhouette, creating in this way new and unusual warped shapes.
As a child Murakami was traumatized when kids took him around for wearing a jumper his mother made. But in this collection, those same imperfections turned into a badge of honour.
This point was also symbolized by a jumper in which musical notes unraveled, almost to represent a dissonant note, a divergent thought in a world that conforms, and people who are simply out of tune.
The contrast between society and the self was also represented by the holes that covered the jumpers and slip dresses in a decorative way (in the previous collection instead holes were a functional excuse to create intricate woven or knotted motifs with ropes View this photo). We often see distressed garments with holes, but here the designer tried to give an explanation for those holes, covering them in three-dimensional oversized wool-hungry crocheted moths.
Some of these moths were suspended around the knits with metal wire, so that they gave the impression they were flying around the garments, almost attacking the models; but there were also moths intarsia-ed into the jumpers, hiding under the cable knitted braids, damaging and distorting them, and unravelling the symmetry of the knitted patterns.
Murakami interpreted the moths not as something destructive, but as something constructive, even optimistic: moths are attracted by light and hence by hope, he argued, therefore his designs were just a way to see the light at the end of a tunnel.
Another thick and cropped vest that seemed to partially fall into pieces, but was actually held together with a row of hooks and eyes, celebrated another commond pest, the street pigeon: considered as "rats of the sky" by many of us, here the knitted pigeons hinted at urban freedom in a cosy and reassuring way.
There were more hints at freedom in Murakami's trademark wide-legged wool trousers: loose, thick and wide, they offered a relaxed and comfortable fit, with a surreal and nerdy twist. The lining of the trousers was indeed rolled around the waist creating the illusion that maybe the rolled up material was the bottom of a shirt popping out of the pants or maybe something more intimate, like boyfriend's boxers peeking from the waist of the trousers.
By eliminating the fashion stunts we got so used to see on the runways of the main fashion capitals, to focus on clothes and off-kilter knits, Murakami proved it is still possible not to conform and follow trends, but celebrate individuality, a concept strengthened by the notes of Frank Sinatra's "My Way" that closed the show.
Murakami's attitude to fashion hasn't change since he renamed and relaunched his label: he still likes to delve into the society Vs the individual dichotomy, fascinated by clumsy, awkward people and creating, as he says, "clothes that serve as attitudes for outcasts".
Nothing was refined or polished in this collection, yet there was no miserabilism, but a dark and subversive twist, a glistening hope in the messy thick jumpers, almost an encouragement to be yourself. After all, as also Oscar Wilde used to say, everyone else is already taken.
Comments