Following last season’s collection built alongside and within Mamoru Hosoda’s soaring anime fantasy Belle, this season Anrealage designer Kunihiko Morinaga made an even greater imaginative leap by taking his collection to the moon. Kind of. This collection was shot and filmed in a moon-simulating Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) lunar training site named the Advanced Facility for Space Exploration. As Morinaga explained, the space agency approached him to collaborate after seeing that Belle collection (it’s nice to consider that Japanese astronauts might sometimes orbit Vogue Runway).
The film began with a close-up of a space boot modeled after NASA’s originals and made in partnership with United Nude lifting slowly down and off the surface to leave a footprint. This was a gentle reference to Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Sea of Tranquillity and, Morinaga stressed in his notes, to the sentiment written upon the plaque he and Buzz Aldrin left there: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
The collection that followed was referential to space suits both in appearance and substance: the collection incorporated an ultra-light aerogel typically used in space gear that offers insulation properties down to -196 degrees Celsius. This material, which Morinaga said was light enough to use every day and in less grueling temperatures, coated a series of helmet-accessorized looks that were either volumized astronaut-appropriate interpretations of Earthling staples, or his Earthling riff on the space suit itself.
Before we got to a second all-white section worn helmetless and all featuring a helmet-friendly wide-neckline there was a series of three amazing black dresses the designer said contained a layered mesh of fiber optic cables. The Anrealage team has developed an app that connects to the garment and allows the wearer—or someone with the wearer’s permission—to pattern, color, or otherwise illustrate the surface of the dresses as they wish: an amazing invention.
This collection’s collaboration with JAXA as well as other industrial Japanese big-hitters, including Toyota and Bridgestone, suggests that Morinaga’s technologically driven creative artistry in fashion design is increasingly being paid attention to as a catalyst for wider innovation. This is a big ideas designer who surprises every season.
