Before the clothes, the frescoes. For this Issey Miyake show, we were in a building that has since 2007 served as France’s Museum of Immigration History. That rebranding rightly flips the space’s original purpose: Built in the late 1920s, it was named the Museum of Colonialism, and in 1931 it received 8 million visitors during an international exhibition dedicated to showcasing the nation’s global colonial interests.
The presentation was held in its central forum, which is decorated by 600 square meters of frescoes painted by Pierre-Henri Ducos de la Haille. These depict France as a heroic female character swathed in imperial red, surrounded by the galleons and frigates of global commerce that connect to her many “dependencies” across five continents. As we waited for the show to start, it was fascinating to scan this spectacular anachronistic monument.
Then the clothes sailed forth to conquer. Titled What Has Always Been, Satoshi Kondo’s collection contemplated clothing beyond history or style, but instead as deeply and intuitively engrained human habit. There were elements to it that seemed almost metaphysical, like the fluted flowerlike apertures that framed all five extremities of the body in the opening few looks. Pieces that sprouted sleeves from ankles to arms appeared to have grown spontaneously around the body, as if it were the garment rather than the wearer that had agency. Carefully draped ensembles in layers of square fabric suggested imagined paleoanthropological archetypes of self-protection, as we imagine Stone Age humans swathing themselves in skins and pelts before the advent of weaving.
Sometimes the brimmed visors worn above headscarfs over Kondo’s poetically draped pieces in technologically advanced Miyake fabrics engendered a romantically nomadic air: They hinted at waves of human movement long predating the magnificent discredited propaganda on the paintings around us. The powerfully colored draped pleated looks near the finale triggered a similar association and also vaguely recalled the magnificent Bene Gesserit costumes in the original David Lynch adaptation of Dune (so, so superior to the lumpen remakes).
The color curation was gorgeous at times. At others, Kondo kept his palette spare and bare in off-white looks whose sections billowed with human movement as you imagined those galleons’ sailcloths straining in the trade winds. When the pattern came, it was captivating. The design team apparently took a selection of native Japanese flowers and herb leaves to which they applied paint to create the outlines, which were later defined by felting. There seemed no botanical veracity to the results, but they were beautiful. This was a wonderful collection presented in an uncomfortable but important space. Both subject and context provided a salutary reminder that things that seem eternal in the present never quite work out that way in the future.
