From his highly cultivated purgatory between restraint and release, Takahiro Miyashita let multiple influences contaminate his creative petri dish this season. There was the classic Beatles movie Help!, of which Miyashita said in his collection notes: “I think they were freely doing everything they wished for, but rarely had time for [themselves], thus [they] could have been quite suppressed too.” This led him to build a collection containing a hidden musical score, via top-half jackets and shirts featuring two straps, and bottom-half pants and shorts featuring three: These five straps, he said, combined to symbolize a musical stave upon which his garments signified the notes.
Further inflections Included James Ellroy’s monumental The Black Dahlia, David Fincher’s Fight Club and the movies of John Cassavetes, all of which were gently referenced in the film that represented Miyashita’s performance of his wearable score. Zippers and safety pins provided a metallic percussion that he said was in part inspired by Judy Blame, while the exclusively monochrome arrangement reflected his consideration of asceticism-in-color as exemplified by OG Ann Demeulemeester. Fresh instrumental input came in a Miyashita invented font that hybridized gothic lettering and Morse code dashes and dots.
The resulting melody blended the piratical and the punkish, playing britches against bikers and Breton stripe below a recurring beret high note. All of Miyashita’s imagined collaborations resulted in an any-gender collection that was nonetheless distinctly his—this is the Soloist, after all—and he underlined his inclination to swim against the tide in his notes, saying, regarding sustainability: “I understand the importance of the topic but at the same time I am concerned that it will quite literally stop garments to further evolve. I don’t think it is right to apply brakes on the evolution of garments and I have an urgency to keep exploring what could be new…I understand the importance of sustainability thus feel alarmed to see it becoming merely a trend.” Like many others, Miyashita suspects that we are in a fault-line moment—that’s why he called this collection “Re”—and this collection was a heartfelt pitch proposing one possible future direction. After all those references there was still time for one more, so he turned to T.S. Eliot for a poetic coda: “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning / The end is where we start from.”
