spotlight on Japanese labels Mihara Yasuhiro, Kenzo

Paris Fashion Week is the ideal occasion for discovering Japanese creativity. Besides labels that have made a significant mark on the French capital’s fashion scene, like Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons, other names have recently caught the eye. Maison Mihara Yasuhiro, which started out in 1997 as Miharayasuhiro, and made its come-back on the Parisian calendar under the new name in 2016, and Nigo, a designer who made a name for himself in the 1990s with his streetwear label, A Bathing Ape, and in 2022 was tasked with relaunching Kenzo.

 
Nigo picked the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF), located in the heart of Paris in rue Vivienne, a few yards from Kenzo’s headquarters, as the venue of his fifth Kenzo show. The location had been recently chosen by another LVMH label, Celine, which filmed its summer 2024 show there. The imposing BNF building opened to the public a year ago, after renovations that lasted a decade. The show’s guests took their seats in the spectacular Labrouste hall, featuring nine cupolas set on iron arches.
 
Among the guests, rappers like Trippie Redd, Quavo and Zack Bia, and US singer-producer Pharrell Williams, a long-standing friend of Nigo’s. Williams is the creative director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear, which showed a few days ago, and was noted posing for the photographers with Sidney Toledano, before greeting Michael Burke, Toledano’s successor at the helm of LVMH’s fashion division, which includes many top labels, Kenzo among them.

Some of the models stepped on the runway carrying a couple of books held together with a strip, but they looked more like travellers than students. For his Fall/Winter 2024-25 collection, Nigo has jettisoned denim to focus on a classic, comfortable wardrobe, designed for roving globetrotters, and including several outerwear items.
 
For example, a harness with oversize pockets, or a quilted gilet, were worn over a formal suit. Gold-buttoned suits in fine wool were matched with large travel bags, while other suits featured an interlaced pattern that became a recurrent motif, in a variety of sizes, in several other looks. Sporty reversed-leather jackets and large mittens riffed on the outdoor/travel theme.
 
The collection featured plenty of Oriental, and especially Japanese influences, like the samurai-style outfits with an added sci-fi vibe borrowed from George Lucas’s Star Wars. Jackets and maxi hooded coats resembled kimonos, constellations of stars were printed or embroidered on certain fabrics, over-skirts layered on top of trousers were reminiscent of the attire of ancient Japanese warriors, and some women’s looks came with skintight thigh-high boots and dresses glittering with silvery and golden sequins, cinched at the waist with a judo-style belt.
 

See catwalk

Maison Mihara Yasuhiro continued to explore the extra-large theme it introduced with the Spring/Summer 2024 collection. The proportions of all the garments, whether denim jackets, parkas, sweatshirts, cardigans or varsity jackets, were decidedly over the top. A “big silhouette,” as defined by Yasuhiro, that extended to the entire collection, which featured new items with burgeoning volumes, like the cocooning down jackets, giant zipped fleeces, and thick hand-knitted cardigans whose sleeves stretched down to the ground, as though straining under the fabric’s weight.
 
A padded denim jacket and a rounded bomber jacket extended so far they folded back onto themselves, creating a  double layer and leaving a slit for the arms to slip through. These garments could be easily worn as capes thanks to their under-arm openings, the wearer’s body disappearing, swallowed up by their voluminous shapes.
 
The effect was that of children wearing adult clothes too large for them, the models’ bodies shrinking beneath the garments. A nostalgic childhood touch was evident in the small bags hanging at the end of a lanyard, worn around the neck or hand-held, in the shape of dinosaurs and other miniature monsters. An accessory that could become a big hit. A longing for the past, especially the 1980s and 90s so dear to Yasuhiro, could be also glimpsed in the various grunge-style, washed-out items, seemingly faded by time.
 
The show was enlivened by a DJ mixing an electro-pop soundtrack from his aquarium-style booth in the middle of the set, and by cheerleaders in red, white and blue outfits, a nod to this year’s Paris Olympics. Yasuhiro said he was inspired by a nightlife mood, designing a collection big on shimmering effects. Silvery lurex threads glittered on sweaters, while some jackets and oversize bags looked like Yuletide tinsel. Leather took on a vinyl look in white enamel-effect trousers and overcoats, and in glossy patent leather ensembles.