When words fail, say it with clothes. Takahiro Miyashita’s fall collection was a love letter of sorts to a “close female friend…a friend and a sister at the same time.” The notes kept the identity of the woman a secret and the nature of the relationship vague, but said that she was someone whose opinion Miyashita holds in high esteem. Whatever the case, Miyashita is a designer who feels things on a different plane than the rest, and when the clothes came out, it was clear that there was some deep and unspeakable emotion that had been poured into them. You wondered if that mysterious woman was one of the faces in the crowd.
Presented in the corridors of Tokyo National Museum’s Hyokeikan (a place originally built to host the wedding of the Taisho Crown Prince), it was Miyashita’s first runway show in a year and a half, and it felt like he’d been saving up for it. A real sense of romance came through in the textures— fluffy vests or layered velvet suit jackets in outfits that mostly ended above the knee, except for hard shoes that were often printed with RAY GUN, a reference to the graphic designer David Carson’s experimental magazine of the same name that Miyashita had admired as a teenager. When hemlines did extend further down the leg, it was in wide leather culottes, or gently restrictive maxi skirts that seemed to hint at holding something back.
Gentle piano music that had been composed by Miyashita’s longtime collaborator Akira Kosemura drifted throughout the halls (go on, play some of his music as you look through the pictures), and the models paced slowly so that each delicate detail sang: the light catching on the cream velvet of a rumpled sleeve, or the tiniest whisper of an eyelet trim on purple and burgundy satin that fell down to the top of the thigh. There was an extraordinary tenderness to it, the kind of show you felt privileged to have been in the room to witness.
Miyashita wasn’t doing interviews, but he answered some brief questions over email after the show. The unnamed woman, it turned out, had not been in Tokyo to see the runway show, but she had seen the collection. “Tears to my eyes,” she had said.
