If you watched this show via stream, you could be forgiven for confusing its concept with that of a recent notable other. “Like Gucci,” smiled Kunihiko Morinaga in agreement: “But not twins—clones!”
Put simply, the first 15 looks that we saw in the live run of show were the same as the last 15 looks, except that the last 15 were worn turned inside out (shoes excepted). Between these two repetitions was a five-look interval of all-black pieces, which—like every other item in this, um, 20-look collection—were constructed from thousands of triangular patches of deadstock fabric drawn from past Anrealage collections. The most complicated look featured just under 4,000 individual pieces of fabric stitched together. The contrast between right way round and inside out was presented more directly online, with the models spliced to walk simultaneously alongside themselves wearing both looks.
This was a 20th-anniversary show, so many of these looks were drawn from past Anrealage silhouettes—and very effective they were too. Even with such a complicated form of construction (surely these pieces were computer modeled before construction), the fit, form, and drape were fluid and attractive. The fabrics ran from Liberty-esque ditsy-print cotton to black grosgrain to air-washed denim.
Morinaga said that after the last two-ish years of digital shows—including possibly my favorite from the whole desperate period—he’d wanted to present these pieces twice, from both inside out and not, to demonstrate something physical: the written-in stitches showing the level of handcraft demanded to create them.
But Morinaga was not going completely analog. Everyone in the audience was issued headphones by Japanese manufacturer NTT Sonority, ear-looped designs whose buds lay on the external concha (above the auditory meatus) to allow the user to hear the outside world and the recorded simultaneously. Through these we listened to a soundtrack that was sometimes broadcast both through them and on the P.A. and sometimes only through them: This was when you could pick up shutter clicks, keyboard taps, and even the odd scrape of pen on notebook.
This collection was a clever way to merge Anrealage’s technological-facing tendencies, which were only heightened during the pandemic, with Morinaga’s fundamental craft. When you looked at sections of the garments closely, it produced the same sense of discombobulation produced by close inspection of an Andreas Gursky photograph: These were huge landscapes of fabric, virtual worlds created by a web of stitched fabric and immense imagination.
