Within the various medley of Tokyo designers, Takeshi Kitazawa is one thing of an outlier, working on a philosophical airplane that few others tread. He has spent the final two seasons working with the theme of Self Portrait, deeply pondering the irreconcilable nature of reflection and self-awareness. “Once we look within the mirror daily, we’re recreating ourselves over and over,” he stated by means of rationalization over a Zoom name. “Your coiffure would possibly look the identical, however perhaps one hair will probably be totally different.”
This time he’d taken Stéphane Mallarmé’s seminal poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (“A throw of the cube won’t ever abolish probability” ) as some extent of inspiration. “Phrases change just a little from once they’re in your head to if you communicate them,” stated Kitazawa. “And I used to be inspired by the poem as a result of it’s about changes, in order that even when issues could look the identical, they aren’t the identical in any respect.”
It makes extra sense if you see the garments. Kitazawa designs with extraordinary sensitivity, updating his monochrome tailoring with the tiniest modifications every season, tweaking the sample of a jacket right here or utilizing a brand new cloth there. It’s a meditative, slower method to style (persevering with on from final season, he’ll solely make a tightly restricted run of ready-to-wear items) which feels refreshing within the business’s more and more frenetic and commercialized panorama. A pair of inky black trousers from his earlier assortment, as an illustration, returned as the primary look of this one, however they’re not fairly the identical.
A winking sexuality typically crops up in Kitazawa’s work too, and this season it got here by means of in metallic nipple brooches (forged from actual life!) on the coolly lower jackets, and within the barely-there translucent tulle which each coated and revealed the physique beneath, and onto which had been threaded phrases from the Mallarmé poem. Considered from afar, the mannequin in look 5 is sporting what seems to be a necktie, however which on nearer inspection is her pores and skin contrasting towards the straight traces of the white shirt. “Jackets are supposed to cowl up your physique, so I purposely tried to convey out the main points of the particular person inside,” he defined.
Kitazawa describes DressedUndressed’s aesthetic as mukishitsu, a Japanese phrase which is tough to translate into English however that may imply inorganic, or coldly synthetic. (Kitazawa himself, however, is an exceedingly heat nature-lover.) It’s nearly as good an instance as any, maybe, of a mirrored image that may come shut however by no means fairly contact: whether or not from native language to overseas one; from human designer to inhuman creation; from the particular person we’re in entrance of the mirror to the terminally unreachable self past.
