Shinya Kozuka is aware of how you can set a scene. Up to now two seasons he’s handled us to a full moon and a swimming pool within the pouring rain, and tonight he erected his runway in a huge makeshift cage exterior Tokyo’s Nationwide Stadium, in order that the sound of cicadas chirruping within the timber stuffed the evening air. The present marked 10 years of his model, and he known as it “picturesque or die.”
It’s an apt mantra for Kozuka, whose work offers most overtly in whimsy—see the birthday celebration balloons and cartoonish cat sweaters right here—however with a disarming emotional, virtually adolescent sensitivity that fizzes beneath the floor. This assortment, he defined, was him trying again on the final decade and determining the place it goes from right here. “It seems like we regarded again to our first season and condensed every part we’ve cultivated up till now,” he mentioned backstage after the present.
Onto the garments, then, which have been manic. Colourful miniature homes have been crocheted into knitted polo tops or embroidered onto blazers, rainbow tweed was made into jumpsuits and Chanel-esque jackets, and vibrant daubs of paint have been smattered throughout sweatpants, hoodies, and smock attire. Toile de jouy unfold in pastoral scenes throughout canvas coats and knitted sweaters, whereas quaint sketches of buildings or anthropomorphic animals adorned others, like tableaux from a youngsters’s storybook. The general impact was one in every of uninhibited pleasure and weirdness, which Kozuka someway wrangled right into a compelling assortment.
Blue—deep, Yves Klein blue—is a recurring reference for the designer, and remained a robust touchpoint this time round, showing all through the present (one mannequin burst forth from a painted ultramarine canvas that doubled as a coat). It didn’t cease there: blue have been the lights that bathed the area, and blue have been the envelopes that contained the present notes, hand-painted by the designer himself. Naturally, the runway was blue, too. “I’ve two pairs of finest pals: two from my hometown [in Osaka] and two I met earlier than I got here to Tokyo. If I think about them as a colour, it’s blue,” Kozuka mentioned. “It’s a colour I need to cherish.”
Because the present ended and we filed exterior into the summer time evening, a spectacular present of celebratory fireworks lit up the sky; they turned out to be from an idol live performance that had been occurring simply throughout the road. The fireworks weren’t meant for Kozuka, in fact, however that hardly mattered. They may as properly have been.
