For Spring, Christian Dada’s designer Masanori “Zoo” Morikawa repeated the word sentimental during a pre-show interview. His simultaneously presented women’s and men’s collections were deeply inspired by a two-volume photography book, released in 1991 by the artist Nobuyoshi Araki, called Laments Skyscapes/Laments From Close-range. Araki published it in honor of his wife, Yoko, who died the year before. Its images are moving—they seem to be caught in the idleness that comes with loss and the moments one finds oneself in when surrounded by absence. Araki took pictures of his wife’s favorite beer glass, dying flowers, a dead lizard, and the morphing, unsettling sky (for these atmospheric shots, he added paint).
Clothing-wise, this resulted in a collection rife with a lightly surrealistic boil-down of sentimentality. It can be hard to translate raw emotion into clothing, and, while Morikawa didn t 100 percent succeed in doing so with every outfit, there were sartorial moments of the beauty Araki found in the wake of his wife’s passing. See: a soft white shirt with prints of the artist’s wilting and drying flora; cobwebbed and semi-transparent knitwear; and a best-on-the-lot, ivory-hued robe with shredded edges, embroidered on the back with a bird’s wing and the title of Araki’s tome.
The show might have benefitted, in the end, from an edit that aligned more with the sensitivity at hand; it ran long and sometimes became a little busy because of it, like with all-over prints on a suit and a leather dress–and–purple trench look. And the finale, while well intentioned, with models coming out covered in scarves featuring prints of Araki’s sky photographs, didn’t quite resonate with the effect of what had come earlier. However, it did leave a positive aftertaste: Sentimentality needn’t be somber. It can be optimistic. And optimism has been a significant takeaway from this men’s Paris Fashion Week.
