Following years of gestation in the Comme des Garçons family, Fumito Ganryu’s baptism as an eponymous label took place at an underground parking lot on the outskirts of Florence this morning. Not only should this have been way closer to the next thing on the schedule, but it really should have been outside. To be really picky—and ask for something beyond anyone’s control—it would have been best of all held in that tempest that so drenched Dior Resort recently.
That’s because the central themes Ganryu navigated were a dialectic between the urban and the natural whose conductor was water. The idea, Ganryu explained, was to make a collection you’d feel free to get wet in. “I want to foster an interaction with nature,” he added.
Many of the items were totally waterproof, such as the monkish “king-size” neoprene robes that opened the show and whose proportions were made to protect a full look within (so these were clothes-for-clothes). And many of them came with changes of clothing, slung from rubber belts or tied around the models: Shorts were worn with a pair of pants hanging unworn at the back; hoodies doubled as hip-held capes; and coats were both worn and hung on the models. This walking wardrobe featured a lot of streamlined and technical visibly bonded black or white performancewear, sandals attached to the foot via either opaque rubbery straps or cable ties, and some minimal matte satin–finish cotton jeans and trucker jackets with a narrow grid of rectangular folds at the buttons.
There was a very attractive section of irregularly cut indigo jersey pieces, really fine, which is where the collection felt its most unabashedly wantable and less engaged with conceptual flourishes. One flourish worked well, though: A mise-en-scène featured two heavily perfumed models demonstrating that their hoodies zipped up to envelop their heads entirely, which would be a brilliant garment to have flying long-haul. At the end came a series of primary-colored neoprene ensembles both worn and attached to the models that swam very close to scuba-esque, and more king-size robes, this time in two beautifully finished and clearly porous fabrications. Although the articulation and styling felt at times overdone, these factors did not obscure how handsome many of the pieces in this collection were. Next season Ganryu relocates to Paris, where he will show going forward.
