Life is a party for Ambush’s Yoon Ahn. Inspired by club culture — particularly the rave scene in Tokyo in the ’90s — she created a series of personas, like youngsters donning a form of costume for a night of hedonism.
Beyond the riotous frenzy of color, fabric choices and embellishment — with Day-Glo colors, psychedelic prints and riotous combinations of feathers, glitter and synthetic fur (pink bunny ear balaclava, anyone?) — dictated by the theme, there was a clear aesthetic to the silhouettes and an overriding practicality to the design approach. The theme was incidentally right on trend at one end of the spectrum in the Paris collections this season.
Shapes were either super-slinky — barely there cropped tops and skirts and cute patchwork knits — or very oversize, with key silhouettes reprised in a variety of ways.
Superwide raver pants in stone-washed denim were given a multitude of practical pockets. Cropped jeans were overlaid with a cargo skirt, or their top part spliced with a superlong, split-front skirt in technical fabric or allover sequins. Bomber jackets were given integrated backpacks, a tailored jacket stitched onto a utility vest so it could be slung off to hang down the back when the temperature rises.
These were accessorized with heavy raver boots, metallic platform sandals and signature heart-shaped bags (as a backpack or padlock-like number to attach to the belt, they were super-practical, too) and chunky jewelry pieces, including a flash drive necklace, inspired by Y2K.
