Over the summer Joseph Altuzarra took a two-week trip to Japan and he put the experience to use in his new pre-fall collection. While traditional dress influenced the silhouettes of many pieces—the biodegradable PVC belts were inspired by obis and a sharply cut jacket had the lapel-less line of kimonos—the country’s rich art history animated others. A flower print that appeared on the underside of a blazer’s lapel and on the lining of a dress whose neckline folded open was lifted from Edo period nature illustrations, and the contemporary artist Ichiro Tsuruta gave Altuzarra exclusive permission to reproduce his painting of a woman’s face as a placement print on a bomber jacket and sheath dress. Tokyo’s neon lights dictated not only the fluorescent color palette of pantsuits, but also the hazy florals of silk dresses, which were designed to evoke blurry nighttime photographs.
“The tension between the reverence for tradition and the passion for the future,” was Altuzarra’s big takeaway from his Japan experience. The shibori pieces he produced with a Nagoya-based shibori studio would seem to fall firmly into the former category, but in fact they required some forward thinking: His pattern called for the dresses to first be smocked, then dyed, a process that the studio had never attempted before. Shibori being a cousin of American tie-dye, these off-the-shoulder dresses in the motif had a bohemian flair, but by and large this collection struck a sultrier, back-to-his-origins note than Altuzarra’s recent outings. Consider the evening numbers, which were bound in the “traditional Japanese bondage” style, not with ropes but with crystal-studded cords. Altuzarra said they followed the strapping and knotting techniques in the latter, though he did quip, “This is not something I did in Japan.”
