Sit through enough fashion shows and you can begin to question their efficacy—until you hit one that so beautifully amplifies the designer s vision, your faith is reaffirmed. You just slump back and surrender to the complete package: styling, music, emotion. And, of course, the clothes. Designer Mihara Yasuhiro achieved this today with a presentation that combined quietly poetic outfits, rare feats of fabric technology, and some of the most jaw-dropping visual effects yet seen in a fashion context. Tears were shed at show s end.
Japanese design company WOW created a shadow play that was back projected in sync with the models coming on and off the runway. As it rained in silhouette, for instance, a man stepped onto the catwalk in one of Yasuhiro s waterproof parka/poncho hybrids.
The designer is a storyteller, and his favorite tale revolves around the urban male s relationship with nature. The inspiration for his latest collection was Henry David Thoreau s Walden, and its celluloid handmaiden, Into the Wild. So, as the back projections told a story of Edenic nature regenerating then degenerating with the appearance of man, then evolving into a city (clearly Paris) that was also washed away, the clothes dressed a kind of grungy Pilgrim s Progress.
They started with the vintage look of aged sweatshirts, cardigans with pulls, patched denims, trompe l oeil shirts knotted around waists, and artfully constructed shorts. Jeweler Husam el Odeh covered a distressed sweatshirt with tiny pieces of domestic hardware like keys and bolts, turning them into fetish objects of a world left behind. Outerwear for our pilgrim s trip into the wild impressively included fatigues in a camouflage pattern composed of flowers (Rei Kawakubo managed a similar illusion with her skulls yesterday). His return to society was anticipated by sophisticated pieces that looked printed but were actually woven, as in a coat with the image of a tree, using a technique that Yasuhiro himself invented. Then, with Paris twinkling in silhouette, came a parade of urban tailoring (though the pilgrim wore fringed suede boots with his suit, still a frontiersman at heart).
During the finale, birds flocked on the screen and, in a cloud of feathers, a silhouette that was recognizably that of the designer came crashing from the sky, before the flesh-and-blood version stepped out to take his bow. When he was asked backstage if he ever wished he could fly, he nodded an enthusiastic yes. Well, today he did.
