“It’s very difficult to explain in my bad English,” said Junichi Abe in excellent English. “I wanted to make a messy image.” Accordingly, the first garment on the rack was a printed black T-shirt overlaid with another T-shirt (by apparently slapped-on sections of silver tape), this one gauze and diagonally red striped. On the inner tee were words printed in different-size fonts—including “details,” “chaos,” “patchwork,” “elegance,” and “first aid”—that were all appropriate to this fastidiously mixed-up, scrappy, and ragtag collection.
Mannish shirts, jackets, pants, and skirts in checked polyester twill were cinched, gathered, and shaped by more apparently ad hoc applications of tape. Little decorative garnishes—a strip of floral at a pocket’s edge, a scrap of ruffle at a hem—were stuck on with more tape. Similarly, there were cut-into field jacket-y bombers in navy or olive that had been hacked via pasted-on strips of grosgrain, mismatched ribbing, and a flash of golden fabric taped under the right collar. A long floral dress, almost mumsy, also got the shaped-by-tape, stuck-on-tulle-frill treatment. Especially brilliant sneakers were similarly DIY flavored, a three-element mix that apparently sampled Nike, New Balance, and Hi-Tec—but was way too cleverly layered to trouble any litigiously inclined corporate IP investigators.
Abe stressed “incompleteness” as a central theme. And maybe some of the sundry parts here did seem bodged together. Yet the whole of the garments they were assembled into—say, in a three-layer sportswear jacket—seemed not only complete but replete: decadently heaped with detail, in-jokes, and twists.
