As 2020 wore on—and on—Masayuki Ino got to thinking about time machines. Part of it came from watching old movies, he said, but his overarching theme this season is about rebirth. “Going out and walking around is my usual source of inspiration,” the designer explained through his interpreter on a Zoom call from Tokyo. Since that wasn’t an option, he looked inward, tapping memory as its own form of time travel.
“In Japanese, we speak of mottainai—a spirit that means don’t waste. It’s kind of nostalgic,” he said, adding that his goal was to create clothes that could be worn at any age, to convey “the importance of dressing carefully rather than throwing things away.”
Inherently that meant turning to sustainable sources. One example is Suffolk wool, a material manufacturers usually discard for imperfections, like flecks of straw. A coat in that material showed a farmer embroidered on the back to illustrate rebirth. Elsewhere, a cherry red coat was made of PET fur upcycled from plastic bottles and fastened with bottle-shaped toggle buttons, and a green cable knit, also in Suffolk wool, was something else entirely before Ino got his hands on it—the
back featured a ‘recycle’ symbol with trailing threads. Regressing even further, Ino made rompers for grown-ups, in one case as a Zoom-appropriate kelly green tailored jacket, offering those so inclined a new spin on comfort dressing. A panda-hood parka, too, recalled
childhood coats.
Getting the world to the point of rebirth is proving longer and more circuitous than anyone could have imagined. Ino, as his base well knows, figures that whatever the journey, you might as well have as much fun as possible getting there.
