Three weeks of overstimulation, under-sleeping, and air-kissing will play havoc with your immune system. As the lights went down at today’s all-purpose CDG venue, bronchial coughs ricocheted around the garage. Our eyes got familiarized with the dimness as an archetypically unfamiliar Ninomiya entity floated from backstage: Clustered around its human host was a pomegranate-like comb of cloth-covered pods illuminated from within by the dim, rosy glow of shrouded filaments. What resembled a bronze kettle or watering can rested on the host’s head.
During the opening phase, Hakushi Hasegawa’s soundtrack was a series of gloopy sonic exchanges that reminded me, alongside Ninomiya’s pinkish and endearingly alien DIY shapes, of an old British kids’ show called The Clangers. A black rose outfit—black-edged mesh petals—and then a look of smaller blooms whose silver chicken-wire petals were edged with bloody red resin (a little Venus flytrap) came past. More bronze receptacles rested above.
Parted-lips-shaped panels kissed their way across metal or leather harness grids worn over tulle in scarlet or black. More lip grids in leather-looking material encaged the wearers before a series of multi-belt bikers. Morning coats bisected by garter-belted cavities opened at the wearers’ guts, and then later, a leather-shoulder cloak/topcoat with a pearl-edged rib-cage detail seemed to hint at a heartbreak narrative lurking somewhere between the gloomy bouquets, kiss-smothered cages, and viral shapes. It all was a fresh verse of wearable metaphysical poetry, romantic this time, from Kei Ninomiya.
