This season marked a different direction for Chika Kisada (or directions, plural; it seemed to shoot off in many), and the designer appeared to have surrendered some of her inhibitions. “It’s as if some unexpected place in my heart has been pried open,” she wrote in the show notes. From that place poured a perversity that Kisada hadn’t shown before.
There were fewer of the easy casual staples that Kisada has leaned on in the past, replaced with a welcome dose of freakishness and bite. Tailored single-breasted jackets—a strong point for the designer in recent seasons—were the star of the show, in one look appearing to have been dissolved around the neck and spliced with lace shoulder straps. Crinoline flashed from under another, skeleton-like, while corsets flared out theatrically at the hips or clasped asymmetrically, almost violently, at the breast. In one memorable look, a tulle bumbag (from the designer’s ongoing collab with Eastpak) was stuffed under the hip of a sheer dress to warp the silhouette, “Lumps Bumps” style. The show took place in a cramped concrete basement, and all the while a tulle-clad cellist played—softly, then desperately—setting the tone.
Kisada called the collection “Intoxication”, and after the show explained her thinking. “I wanted to create something a little narcissistic that would make me drunk on my own aesthetic,” she said. To do this, she invited a university professor “who studies video expression” to come and look at her collections and tell her his impressions. She also cited the French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey, an early pioneer of cinematography, as a source of inspiration, and spoke about incorporating the “continuity” of movement into her work. The intentionally awkward, sometimes restrictive silhouettes that resulted served to highlight Kisada’s acute sense for the body, which comes from her ballerina background. This time, with the refreshing weirdness this collection brought, she also proved herself a contortionist.
