Takahiro Miyashita’s English is apparently not the best (I suspect his ignorance is cleverly feigned). This does not matter because his shows communicate beautifully. Tonight’s was an extended sigh of masculine melancholy, both patently personal to the designer and universal enough that every man of a certain vintage and predisposition could shiver along with the pathos of kinship.
These were red pill clothes designed to rattle the bars of identity, ably abetted by a soundtrack that ran from Jackson C. Frank’s “My Name is Carnival” to Sinatra’s version of “Send In The Clowns.” The clown eye makeup, recent use of Frank’s song in Joker, and garments printed with quotations attributed to Charlie Chaplin (including “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot,” and “I always like walking in the rain, so no one can see me crying”) were strong hints Miyashita was exploring masculine facades and the voids beneath them. This was a theme wonderfully encapsulated by the jacket-less reveres and coatless collars in a panoply of different vintage shapes and traditional fabrics that ran through the whole collection: fronts without backs, surfaces without depths, empty vessels.
The reason why the collection was so sparse in the pants department—shorts ruled this runway—might have been as basic as vulnerability. Many of the garments featured strapping, vaguely threatening and institutional, that hinted at mental limits tested, bent, and constrained. Quite what the models who carried single blooms or small bouquets of jet black roses were mourning remained unsaid. Another brooding punctuation mark was the opaquely painted clock that read to eleven past eleven printed on some of the coats and shorts near the end and on the outside back of the upper of every riding boot worn down the Soloist runway.
The strain placed upon male mental health by patriarchally embedded paradigms of maleness is a subject receiving increasing attention both beyond fashion and within it: Just yesterday Zegna and Gucci were engaged in an exchange about masculinity, toxic and not, on Instagram that would have been unimaginable until recently. No single entity can own male melancholy and existential angst—it is the unfortunate possession of too many for that—but the Soloist’s exploration of it is uniquely expressed. This collection was a poetically recounted course of unresolved therapy as painfully “authentic” as a runway show can be.
