After his fall 23 show in the basement of Japan’s National Stadium, Koki Enomoto looked up at the curve of sky visible from the stadium roof, and snapped a photo on his phone for prosperity.
Enomoto is Tokyo’s minimalist designer of the moment, and the photo he’d taken reminded him of collages by one of his favorite artists, the American minimalist Ellsworth Kelly. It was a typically clean segue into this season, which is devoted to edges—the edges of clothes and the edges of the body, and how they relate to one another. “I really felt responsive to the lines and proportions in that photo, and wondered what it would be like if I applied that to clothes,” he said.
In the lookbook Enomoto used to present this collection, the models appear like cutouts: sometimes far away, sometimes close, Attachment’s characteristically chic-yet-streetwise tailoring throwing no shadows on the liminal background. Here and there the lapels of jackets or waists of (beautifully cut) trousers are accessorized with a reflective plate of rounded metal hardware, another nod to that curve of sky in the photo.
Though Enomoto is a lofty thinker, he’s also a logical one—he makes clothes about clothes, not about art—and so he concentrated on the extremities of the clothing directly, subtly exaggerating the cuffs on the trousers or adding an extra hem to the bottom of a pair of shorts. It was a simple enough twist that gave the whole thing extra dimension, and rescued it from feeling too plain. “If you add another hemline, it creates another edge,” he said.
Like many ambitious Tokyo designers, Enomoto has his sights firmly set on showing in Paris. This season he broke away from Tokyo’s main fashion week (which will be held from August 28) to release his collection closer to the international men’s schedule; that way he could close orders quickly and get a head start on the next season. “Things are going well overseas, sales are good and the business is growing,” he said. “I want to take an approach that will bring us a little closer to the rest of the world, even if only by half a step.” How far he can push the edges of his own future, time will tell.
