At last! Some art. This Soloist collection won’t be for everyone—although you will see its many-splendored, multi-zippered expressions of exposure dribble down into lesser technical lines—plus, objectively, it was at times ridiculous. But that’s fashion. The upside was that tonight, in this first Paris show with his brand under this nom de guerre, Takahiro Miyashita achieved fleeting wearable stanzas of poetry in menswear: No mean feat.
That’s not just because these clothes were etched in sentences. I spent a fair part of this show noting the verses on Miyashita’s clothes, attached in patched sections, on the assumption they would be a trackback-able reference that would help unlock the message of the collection—hey, a normal designer would hang his or her collection on that. Frustratingly, however, they were not minor Ezra Pound or major Stephen Spender, or anything else recognized on Google—they were just sparse pieces of rather sad, wan poetry.
Around them, presented on the wooden cobbles of the Bastille Design Center, were looks that were simultaneously tough and tender. The general drift was that above the waist it was all postapocalyptic wear, sometimes rubberized, sometimes knit, in softly puckered protective layers split by revealing scars of unzippered exposure. Satisfyingly, considering this was a seasonal theme stumbled upon, there were jankets 3.0—see Emporio and Ganryu previously. Below all the swathing were exposed legs (provocative and tender at once) above big faux-surplus boots. This was a man dressed up to repel a danger that he was himself the source of: beautiful and true, and a Catch 22. Man trouble.
