You could go mad trying to stay abreast of the volume of photo books streaming out of Japan. Photographers there regard putting out a book the same way their counterparts in the West think of staging a gallery show. It makes so much sense, not just for production but also for access to an audience. When Yoshinori Mizutani won awards for Tokyo Parrots, he caught the eye of Yusuke Takahashi, the menswear designer for Issey Miyake. He recognized a kindred spirit in Mizutani, both of them leading lights in Japan's new generation of creators, and both keen to prove that a photo's potential extends beyond a flat printed image.
Takahashi's theme was urban nature, reflecting the ways in which the natural world interacts with a man-made environment. Tokyo, for example, has a large population of parrots, captured in Mizutani's stunning hyper-real photographs, which were printed here on shirts, woven into jacquards for a coat and a pair of pants, and dissected into strips of fabric that were woven into tweeds that still maintained the vivid color schemes of the original images. Utterly charming, if you fancy psittacines cavorting across your torso come next spring.
Mizutani's latest book, Colors, was similarly sourced, its abstract urban imagery creating fractured patterns for shorts suits that possibly had a little too much of the harlequin about them. Takahashi also referenced Luis Barragán's buildings in Mexico City for a passage of outfits that looked pretty much just like that: artificially constructed architecture for the body. Again, surprisingly theatrical for Miyake, and slightly disappointing for that. Still, Takahashi had us at the parrots.
