Takahiro Miyashita is nearly 10,000 kilometers away from his traditional platform at Paris Fashion Week. Yet ironically enough from his home in Japan the designer delivered more commentary with this digital presentation than he ever has in person at a physical show. That was thanks to a Q&A with editor Junsuke Yamasaki that dropped into the inbox along with the usual WeTransfers.
Of the film of the collection that begins with close-ups of a scalpel slicing sections of text—consistent with Miyashita’s choppily assertive use of graphics—and also features some shots of the pieces being worn in what looks like a dystopian Amazon fulfillment center, the designer observed: “I asked my old friend to do the music, but I also started to have a feeling for taking a part in the music creation myself and actually tried some guitar and humming. My final thought is that a clothes maker could actually dabble in creating a film without having to call on a grand production team, and finish a piece.”
Yamasaki also asked, reasonably, if Miyashita had, as he had heard, included a womenswear line with this collection, to which the designer answered: “That’s because there was a woman appearing in the scene. But as I have mentioned since the beginning, I’m not interested in sex or gender difference. There’s no particular intention in doing a women’s line and I imagined quite a manlike woman in any case.”
That theme was central to a collection in which the designer was working to reject categorizations of size, gender, age—everything, really—by presenting a suite of universally wearable garments fashioned in his no-sew style. As a manifesto, that sounds very uplifting, but Miyashita sees the world through a dark prism. The central armless jacket shape was based around the design of a suit carrier, and by characterizing his male and female characters as “John Doe” and “Jane Doe,” he presented the viewer with a clothing-as-body-bag conclusion. And yet via his graphics, which included “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for” (Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls) and “Long is the way, and hard, that leads out of hell that leads up to light” (John Milton, Paradise Lost, by way of Se7en), he also hinted at hope inside the misanthrope.
