Shinpei Yamagishi, like the rest of us, is fed up with the state of the world. “I’ve been feeling particularly tired of social media recently,” he said before his show. “It has a lot of influence on the choices people make. We should be much freer.” Thus the theme of Bed j.w. Ford’s second runway presentation at Tokyo Fashion Week was what Yamagishi called “looking closely in the mirror.” Not in a narcissistic, selfie-snapping, Kim K. kind of way, but more about, you know, looking within. Trust your own taste and identity, and run with it.
Yamagishi ran well. Crushed velvets in crimson or gold were layered over flashes of marmalade rayon, lending an old-world romance to swaths of shadowy wool, and trousers were fashioned asymmetrically like skirts, thin leather belts dangling from their waists karate-style. A delicate white shirt was held together with little ties that frittered in the air. “I concentrated on details and precision, and got caught up in how to tie things together without using buttons,” he said. The pockets, too, used unconventional design; Yamagishi is self-taught. “I didn’t learn how to design in a school, so I don’t have basic knowledge of how to create some things, like a pocket,” he explained. So instead, pockets appeared on beautifully soft wool coats as simple frayed slits from which the lining peeked out.
If that sounds slapdash, it wasn’t. Everything that Yamagishi designs is painfully considered, and his color and fabric combinations are consistently spot-on if a little gloomy. “Perhaps when I get married I’ll do a whole collection in bright pink,” he said. What Bed j.w. Ford’s clothes lack in exuberance, though, they make up for in wearable sensuality. Also, they’ve recently become mainstays in shop windows all over Omotesando. The hype is deserved; if Yamagishi can keep this up, Japanese menswear is in safe hands.
