Everyone in the audience at the Issey Miyake show today could lay claim to a personal first. There can't have been a soul in the place who had ever been to a fashion show before that was inspired by a fish.
Designer Dai Fujiwara has a fierce intelligence; he takes inspiration where he finds it. For Spring, he'd considered the trout and decided its elegance and its deceptiveness made it an appropriate starting point for an exercise in fashion illusion. While the result was too scattered to be considered one of his best, it still left the viewer with some striking images—and some winning outfits.
The abstract broken plaids that opened the show suggested sun glinting through water on fish scales, and the trout's rainbow speckles inspired a woven dot pattern for a suit and coat. Fujiwara is a playful wonder with colors: The artisanal blues and vermilion stood out here. He's also capable of creating sober tailored pieces, or at least sober on the surface: Hidden pockets were supposed to be a sartorial correlative to the deviousness of the trout. (With Miyake's last women's show, Fujiwara proved himself a master mathematician—now he's adding piscatorial psychologist to his repertoire.) And, because you can't have a trout without a fisherman, the designer also offered some sporty, summery pieces that would suit a day hanging out at the creek.
