Satoshi Kondo presented a finely executed, elegant collection, full of draped pieces made with some transparent fabrics and mono-colors.
Inspiration from nature and new techniques for garment-making played a role again this season.
“The process has always been how to make it modern and ours,” said Kondo. This worked brilliantly for spring.
A key inspiration this season was a photo Kondo took of a sheer flag fluttering against the sky.
“There’s something beautiful about this form; it just keeps changing and is not static at all,” the designer said. “You cannot really explain that in words.”
You May Also Like
But Kondo could in clothing, also keeping in mind natural elements such as fire, wind or water.
“They all have this ‘formless,’ or ‘undefined’ shape,” he continued. To delve into such shape-shifting, the design team took a breadbaking workshop.
“We wanted to train ourselves, in a way, [so] that we do not control everything,” said Kondo. “There’s always this accident in breadmaking, or forms in nature, that’s always serendipitous. Maybe in clothing-making there’s also room for accident, for really beautiful happenings.”
What’s unexpected can be highly interesting, as this collection showed.
Its opening looks were named “ambiguous,” made up of sheer, draped, long knit dresses — in colors such as white, black, peach or pale purple and tubular shapes — with oversize sleeves.
“We created a design that allowed that drapery to naturally form,” said Kondo, explaining he used high-twist cotton yarn in Wholegarment technology. This “listening to the yarn’s voice” does not give a static feel, but more like a flag wafting.
An exclusive stretchy fabric made of natural washi yarn mixed with a synthetic yarn was also used frequently. “It looks like it has this paper texture,” said Kondo.
The color palette was inspired by discreet hues found in nature, but also some that popped such as orange and azure.
Top-to-toe looks included delicate hats made of wound-around fabric or textured washi paper in the same shade as the clothes, to marvelous effect.