Although super-frustrating to try and see on a phone until you worked out how to lock its geomagnetic auto-correction orientation, this Anrealage show and collection was also super-fun. As Kunihiko Morinaga said in a gloriously cryptic preshow email exchange: “The sky covers the world. It’s unusual. The ground supports the world. It’s usual.” Asked for clarification, he added: “The digital fashion show brought by this pandemic situation has changed the world…. Everything has become flat. There is no top and bottom in the screen, even gravity and mass have disappeared.”
Morinaga’s rebuttal to our 2D digital purgatory was to reimpose the laws of gravity while simultaneously flouting them. His models walked first on the floor and then the ceiling, the looks reflecting their relative “usual” or “unusual” positioning. Worn at 180 degrees, polka dots, checks, houndstooth, a star pattern, floral, and argyle diamonds all tumbled down (or up, if worn foot to floor) toward the shoulder. A funny sweater made a Zoom-age mockery of Sir Isaac Newton’s observation about apples and gravity. It wasn’t only patterns that succumbed to inversion: Pockets and collars on bikers, truckers and trenches, ruffles on dresses, hems on bombers, and even shoelaces were fashioned to appear upside down even when the “right” way up. Another less visible reflection of now’s unusual normal was in the collection’s fabrication. According to Morinaga, about half of it was made using fabric with antiviral properties. He added: “How to see the garments, how to present the garments, how to buy the garments...every method that was unusual has become usual. In this pandemic situation extraordinary things became everyday, and the two opposite worlds became mixed.” This was a collection that turned downside into upside via a simple conceit that was ingeniously executed.
