As we increasingly experience so much in our lives by peering through tiny handheld digital windows, the inherently analog platform that is fashion has—this season, especially—responded by proposing garments that bear the physical trace of the hands that made them.
This Issey Miyake collection took that urge for clothes that bear the authenticity of touch by ingeniously proposing garments that allow the wearer to shape and bend them to their own individual specifications. This was thanks to the introduction of a new fabrication the company is calling Dough Dough: The mostly finely, irregularly striped garments in a red, a teal-touched blue, and a purple, which you can see in hats, bodices, and skirts here, are made of the material. In very basic terms, the fabric looks stiff but is malleable. Woven into it is a urethane mesh that, as the name implies, allows it to be molded. One model demonstrated its versatility mid-runway by opening what appeared to be a flat piece of reddish material, unfolding it into a wide-brimmed hat, and then molding the brim this way and that as she walked in her long, richly color-stained dress. The rural-looking straw hats at the start, plus the burlap-looking hat similarly reshaped by a model earlyish in the show, seemed to indicate that Yoshiyuki Miyamae’s inspiration for the Dough Dough concept was rooted in a traditional concept. In the finale, models came out in groups according to whichever decorative stories their clothes were telling—these included non–Dough Dough looks of what appeared to be cotton printed with brushstrokes and a fabulous fabric that had seemingly been heavily oil painted and from which hung irregular scales of color. Those who were wearing the Dough Dough pieces had fun tweaking their necklines and scrunching their hemlines as they went. The idea of a garment you can easily shape to wear in a new way whenever you wish is pretty compelling—and just imagine were Miyake to team up with Anrealage to use the fellow-Japanese label’s fabrics that change color. A photochromic Dough Dough dress that you could change both in shape and color? You could Instagram that every day without ever getting bored.
