Masayuki Ino learned a new life skill during confinement: For the first time ever, he baked his wife a birthday cake. “Usually, we go out,” he explained during a Zoom interview. “She was so happy.” One good thing about lockdown, he said, was being able to boost her spirits.
While drumming up creative things to do, he also made many of his followers happy by posting instructions for DIY masks online, and he also produced some with a tiger’s muzzle, or trompe l’oeil human faces either smiling or mugging as if for a selfie.
From there, he decided to create a collection dedicated to celebrating un-birthdays. His video, entitled “Strangest Comfort” stars a bear who loves birthdays, Valentines, and weddings, who runs around making people happy.
“Giving presents to someone is very important, but caring for someone and seeing their smile is what gives me even greater pleasure,” said the designer. “It’s about being heart-to-heart.”
For spring, one example comes wrapped like a gift box: Unwrapped, it becomes a jacket, and its ribbon a belt. A pouch printed with teddy bears and gifts unfolds into silky-looking pajamas. Even socks wax poetic when balled up like a single stem rose; unrolled, they display various messages like “kindness” and “joy.”
Elsewhere, Ino used hand crochet to come up with a bear top with “paw” sleeves that could fold up or serve as mittens. Pants, too, had paws that could fold up to be revealed, or worn down and concealed. A matching hat could be pulled down into a full-head mask. A customizable T-shirt came with 44 capital letters to stick inside a velcro frame in front and spell out a mood. Underneath, the caption reads “Do you know what day this is?”
Ino tries to live in the moment, and to that end he came up with a cool denim jacket that channels a perennial vintage favorite while capturing our own times. Plain in front, its back features a sewn-in collage of Polaroid snaps. In daylight, they appear shiny, black and undeveloped. Point a phone and flash a picture, and images emerge, such as a teddy bear. The technology, called “Rainbow Film,” came courtesy of the Japanese supplier Label Film; Ino also used it on a coat and hoodies. Doublet’s base will delight in those, as well as the bear-in-the-pocket T-shirt shown here.
Ino has a few other things up his sleeves too, like a “small collaboration with a big name,” to be announced soon. Until then, he’s betting on a smile to muddle through bleak times.
