Happy 10th fashion show birthday to Kei Ninomiya. The very first press-attended Noir show, on Sunday, March 8, 2015, was announced at the very last minute. It was held at 10 a.m. in an upper showroom space at the Comme des Garçons Place Vendôme HQ, immediately after Comme Comme, and reported by me on Style.com as a news post.
“There was at least one weeper on the benches this morning,” noted that report, which also quoted Ninomiya as saying: “I want to make something new. And to make new things we have to find a new way of making.”
Fast-forward to midday today, and Ninomiya—still with his trademark mohawk, but these days showing in the bigger Rue Auber “Comme Day” complex—is still creating new ways of making. This season’s innovation was the use of handworked resin-covered segments and embellishments to shape his beyond-human volumes and muster unorthodox visual textures. The agenda, declared Ninomiya in his notes, was to generate “a kind of feeling that is hard to understand.” Backstage, he clarified that he aimed to accentuate the positive: “A new, something-happy or something-good feeling. A nice feeling.”
One of the nice feelings generated by this often punchily colored collection set on its gold Reebok pedestals came as you cast around for real-world comparisons. To me, the garments variously resembled coral reefs. A bee’s abdomen seen under a microscope. A sea urchin. An aura. A bouquet. A baby’s mobile, or maybe a chandelier. Cartoonish hair sculptures, like dramatic Sonic quiffs of carved polystyrene packing foam, added to the delicious strangeness. The looks featuring gold Lurex knits over houndstooth separates garnished with oversized pipe-cleaner bows were, for Ninomiya, almost shockingly recognizable in their adjacency to conventionally worn clothing.
Ninomiya remains as innovative, experimental, and undefinable as he ever was, a designer of extraordinary Rorschach fashion who reveals more about the watcher than he ever does the maker.
