It’s brilliant and early on a cloudy autumn morning in Tokyo, and up on the seventh ground of Comme Des Garçons’ HQ constructing is the darkish room the place Tao Kurihara has taken to exhibiting her collections. Tao’s rustic, folksy vibe units her aside because the earthiest designer within the Comme steady, and her garments are probably the most unabashedly girlish (maybe except for the Comme des Garçons Lady line). However the place the CDG Lady is prim and correct, exhibiting as much as class on time along with her neatly pressed Peter Pan collar shirts and schoolgirl skirts, Tao’s damsel has run away with the fairies to go and stay within the woods.
That idiosyncratic sense of caprice felt significantly potent on this assortment, which was impressed by Tove Jansson—the Finnish artist and creator greatest generally known as the creator of The Moomins. Unsurprisingly, The Moomins are huge in Japan (a fast look on the web site exhibits extra Moomin shops in Japan than wherever else on the earth), and 2024 marks 80 years since Jansson first introduced them into the world. If that feels like foreshadowing for a collab assortment of thinly veiled Moomin-merch, you don’t know Tao.
“I created this assortment hoping that by printing Jansson’s great and highly effective drawings onto cloth and sporting them, I may generate new concepts,” learn the present notes. Whereas a lesser designer may need plastered the characters verbatim onto the garments, Kurihara went deep into Jansson’s lore, reworking the artist’s self portraits (ciggie in mouth) into large polka dots and harlequin prints on vividly brilliant dirndl skirts—and, although not seen on the runway, printed the flop-nosed character Snork, an early Moomin prototype, onto T-shirts and totes. The colours, too, typically recalled the foresty, natural tones of Jansson’s work, with Finnish landscapes and meadowy floral prints showing on cotton attire, usually warped and spliced with ruches of tulle in order that they pouf out into that bottom-heavy, unmistakably Comme silhouette.
Later got here a smattering of white seems to be, enlivened as regular with broderie anglaise and asymmetrical ruffles, adopted by grey tailor-made jackets which grew to become progressively extra mangled (however superbly so) with ruching that swept throughout the shoulders and chest. The ultimate seems to be had been wealthy layers of stormy-colored tulle and sheer metallic cloth, once more printed with Jansson’s smoking vignette. It was as distinctive an interpretation of Moominvalley as might be hoped for, and confirmed Kurihara’s knack for deftly moulding her inspirations into the Comme universe.
Kurihara is clearly from the Rei Kawakubo faculty of design, right down to the best way she talks about “producing new concepts” by means of the dissonance of knocking issues collectively. She joined the enterprise in 1997 solely a 12 months after graduating from Saint Martins, and out of all of the designers within the Comme household appears most near its matriarch in style and sensibility—in addition to along with her capacity for making the artsy and eccentric really feel commercially viable. Nonetheless, it might be attention-grabbing to see Tao colour additional outdoors of the strains that Kawakubo has written. To cite Kurihara herself on the rationale she was impressed by Jansson: “She lived her life with out forgetting her personal independence and freedom.” Phrases to stay by.
