This show started accompanied by a deep, sonorous tone a little like a whale song. “Or is this the score from Arrival?” wondered Gabriella Karefa-Johnson. “It’s like a tesseract,” observed another benchmate when Look 28 came out. Noir Kei Ninomiya collections tend to leave you scrambling for similes, mining for metaphors, and reaching for references.
The strongest lead in this one was the poem read during the show by Aoyagi Natsumi, an incantation that seemed to consider personal physical metamorphosis and the consciousness of marine life. She listed the names of tiny undersea organisms: foraminifera (what a great word). You could see where Natsumi, who wrote her text after seeing this collection, was coming from. But in the end, the designer said afterward via translation, “it was something very playful. Happiness. Like childhood, the first drawing. And it makes this idea of the collection.”
What this show didn’t leave you grasping for was a sense of its excellence. This season, Ninomiya crafted his carapace-garments from grommeted meshed networks of 2D and 3D star-shaped material: metallics, poly-leather, crystals on fabric, chain-linked wire, and feather-fronded lace paillettes. There were blooming trumpet tuftings of fabric that orbed around the body supported by auras of black wire. The tesseract pieces were geometric structures framed in bunched strips of wide-mesh material. Around the swirling drama of Ninomiya’s signature sculptural items some standout garments drifted past. Look 20’s drop-waisted dress was expertly petticoated to pop with each step. The cropped-waist tailcoats and pleat-hemmed blazers were sleek and semi-sinister.
Backstage, Ninomiya added that he saw the collection as a product of multiple collaborative voices. Others in his chorus this season included Jimmy Choo, whose creative director, Sandra Choi, contributed mid-heeled loafer/brothel creepers and black oxfords studded with chrome star-shaped studs. Hakushi Hasegawa crafted the musical setting for Natsumi’s deeply felt oration. The headpieces came via Shinji Konishi: great, sometimes Edvard Munch–ish objects in multiple colors in which you could see the impressions of the fingers that had shaped them.
