So here’s a question that has maybe never felt more pertinent than on this particular Super Tuesday: What happens to a message delivered on a constant stream of meaningless noise? It doesn’t become any less potent, argues Kunihiko Morinaga, whose latest collection for Anrealage played with that very idea. Anrealage is a line that can be reliably counted on to start every Paris season with a sort of magic eye trick devoted to a single concept, and today was no different. Instead of a television screen, models were viewed through a different kind of box: four panels of a delicately ribbed scrim, upon which they occasionally pressed their square-shouldered sheath dresses so that a pattern—floral, grid of houndstooth—might appear. Instead of politically motivated taunts, xenophobic rhetoric, or bluster, a cacophony of static played as the soundtrack (think dial-up Internet, only much louder). It wasn’t particularly easy to take, but then again, neither is this election cycle. Which isn’t to say that Morinaga has even been thinking about the American presidential election (he did not betray as much backstage), but rather it’s interesting that that particular decibel has infiltrated even minds that are (at the moment, at least) more preoccupied with runways than polling numbers.
But back to the clothes: Give or take the odd well-crafted cocoon coat or appealing chubby cropped knit, the silhouette was strong-shouldered and boxy, with fabric made of 1,000 pieces of patchwork, digitally printed Ultrasuede, or jacquards “coded” using a technique called visual cryptography, which Morinaga created in collaboration with computer programmer and artist Toru Urakawa. The looks in the finale came with their own viewing screens, buckled-together semi-transparent panels to be strapped on like armor, or aprons, or accents, depending on the angle. The underlying fabric was made of an unassuming grayscale of discreet little black boxes, in turn made by, one assumes, all of those little 0s and 1s—as are, if you think about it, most of our lives and the visuals we create and consume every day. Here they were turned into skirtsuits and trousers, jackets and sheaths. And this is the thing with Anrealage: It can go as deep as you want to take it, or it can stay right on the surface, surfing its very own wave of white noise.
