Japanese Fashion - Past, Present, Future?

by Sarah Scaturro

Issey Miyake's new 132 5 collection as displayed in the Barbican Art Gallery's exhibition "Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion." Photo by Barbican Art Gallery.

We all know that fashion is an expression of the zeitgeist – a style or trend can explode out of seemingly nowhere, with disparate tribes and geographies adopting it simultaneously. Fashion exhibitions are no different. The past few years have seen many exhibitions mounted on similar topics (colors, sustainability, glamour, etc). Currently there are two very different exhibitions on display about Japanese fashion. The first is “Japan Fashion Now” at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (MFIT) in New York City, and the second is “Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion” at the Barbican Art Gallery in London.

There are some obvious similarities between these exhibitions – both are curated by top curators in the field (Valerie Steele at MFIT and the Kyoto Costume Institute’s Akiko Fukai at the Barbican). Both focus on Japanese fashion designers and celebrate their contributions to the Western fashion system. Both show looks dating back to 30 years ago and pay attention to contemporary Japanese sub-cultures. But that’s it. Their interpretations, exhibition design and overall approaches are radically different. I first visited the MFIT exhibition “Japan Fashion Now” when it opened - having seen almost all MFIT exhibitions over the past 6 years, I figured I knew what to expect. I was happily surprised to see that the first gallery of the show had been enlarged and was dedicated exclusively to early works by the groundbreaking designers who were the first to put Japanese fashion on the map: Rei Kawakubo, Issey Miyake, Hanae Mori, and Yohji Yamamoto were among this group. This immediately made a lot of sense, since the thesis of the show was about what is happening now in Japan, rather than in the 1980/90s. I asked a close friend of mine what she thought about this first room after visiting it on her own. “They look like dead, headless corpses in a cemetery” she replied, citing the dark room, low ceilings and headless white mannequins wearing somber colored garments as the main issue. Now, she isn’t familiar with the challenges of the introductory gallery space and fashion exhibition display in general (low ceilings, low light levels, stiff mannequins, etc.), but she did have a point, especially when contrasted to the main exhibition space with its J-Pop music, vibrant colors, and soaring walls vinyled in a Tokyo-like cityscape. She also could have been reacting to the severity and deconstructed qualities of the garments on display in the first gallery – I could only imagine how shocking they must have seemed at the time when they were first shown decades ago. I personally thought the first gallery was a meditative moment, and was a nice contrast to the main exhibition space.

The first gallery in the "Japan Fashion Now" exhibition at MFIT. Photo by MFIT.

Entering into the main exhibition gallery, I was dynamically swept into a miniature city landscape. MFIT really used the gallery’s too-high ceiling to their advantage, creating a sort of mini-Harujuku by stitching together photos of Tokyo buildings and enlarging them to cover all the gallery walls. This mise-en-scène held more recent looks from designers also shown in the first gallery, but focused mainly on the contemporary generation of Japanese fashion designers. The platform featuring menswear designers was especially insightful, as it succinctly displayed a lot of what Japanese fashion is known for: technology, heritage, authenticity, gender-bending, punk, deconstruction, playfulness, elegance, etc. I really wanted to like the section on subcultures and street fashion, but it just didn’t resonate with me. The scary teenage girl mannequins were one problem, but the main reason was that part of the success of the subculture movement is that it is about a fantastical (and powerful) sense of individualism and performance. Without seeing the actual girl wearing the clothes, with her movements, voice, hair, shoes, etc, I just didn’t buy it – they looked more like costumes for Halloween than street-fashion. Although, maybe that was the point. It was nice to see MFIT touch upon the tribal, or “zoku,” subcultures (I remember being infatuated with the style of the Bosozoku [motorcycle gangs] when I lived in Japan a decade ago) as well as the never-ending search for “authenticity,” particularly concerning Japanese denim.

View of the first floor gallery from the second floor of the "Future Beauty" exhibition. Photo by Sarah Scaturro

The joyful cacophony of color, styles and sound at the MFIT exhibition contrasts sharply with the white, almost Zen-like design of the Barbican show. “Future Beauty” is broken up into two floors, with the second floor essentially a square with an open center, looking down onto the first floor gallery. Just like MFIT exploited the high ceilings of their main gallery, the Barbican used the high ceilings of the first floor to hang sheer white silk-like panels of fabric. As a design element, these fabric panels served several purposes - they made a pathway through the exhibition, they delineated themes, and they created small, intimate moments in which to view the garments, sometimes only a single look. The show itself was broken into several themes, with the first floor exploring “In Praise of Shadows,” “Flatness,” “Tradition and Innovation,” and “Cool Japan.” My favorite section on the first floor was “Flatness,” which displayed Miyake’s A Piece of Cloth and Pleats concepts in a dynamic and inventive way, and also included a separate display of Kawakubo’s garments shown on mannequins coupled with Naoya Hatakeyama’s photos of the same garments flattened out. As Fukai in the Gallery Guide points out, “the interstices between fabric and figure…represent an expression of ‘ma’ – the Japanese concept which views the void between objects as a rich, energized space.” The “Cool Japan” section was the only nod to street fashion and sub-cultural styles in the exhibition. Interestingly, whereas MFIT showed actual street fashion garments, the Barbican displayed only high fashion garments inspired by street fashion, anime and “zoku” style (designers included Ohya, Zucca, Jun Takahashi and Tao Kurihara). Fukai mentions that these designers were “eschew[ing] the visual overload common to Tokyo street fashion in favor of a simpler, more iconic use of manga characters.” I think this comment can be extended to describe the two exhibition design approaches in general – one is about visual overload, while the other is about restraint.

The second floor featured small vignettes of the work by the most well-known (and presumably most important) Japanese designers, including Miyake, Yamamoto, Takahashi, Kurihara, Watanabe, and Kawakubo. It also included a section on Mintdesigns, a duo who use print and graphics in an almost “fetishistic” manner, as well as another section on “The Next Generation,” which included work by Chitose Abe, Tamae Hirokawa and Akira Naka. Honestly, after seeing all other sections before, I was underwhelmed by the choices included in “The Next Generation” – they seemed a lot like rehashings of ideas already expressed by earlier generations of Japanese designers. The section on Kawakubo was especially touching, as it showed several looks from her revered 1997 Spring/Summer collection Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body, as well as a video showing the actual runway show. I had never actually seen the runway show, so I had no idea that the audience was rapturously clapping as each model appeared and walked down the runway.

The titles to the two exhibitions give the most overt clue to their fundamental difference – the MFIT show focuses on celebrating the here and now of Japanese style, whereas the Barbican show leaves a distinct feeling that the glory years of Japanese fashion are mostly in the past (even though its title ironically includes the phrase "Future Beauty.") I left the MFIT show with a sense that Japanese fashion was fun, quirky, youth-oriented and democratic, whereas the Barbican show seemed to elevate all of Japanese fashion into the cerebral realm of art (I think the fact that the MFIT exhibit was free whereas the Barbican show cost around $18 also contributed to that mindset.)

A large part of the disconnect between the two exhibitions has to do with the fact that the Barbican exhibit was curated by a Japanese fashion insider, whereas the MFIT show was organized by an outsider looking in at contemporary Japanese culture. This inside/outside dichotomy can’t be overstressed, as it plays into every aspect of interaction Japan has with outside cultures – even fashion. (As someone who has lived in Japan, I am very aware of having always been considered a “gaijin,” which means “alien.”) Fukai even presented a run of fashion show invitations from Miyake that she had actually received, further emphasizing her own inclusion, and by extension authority, in the realm of Japanese fashion. Precise and tightly-edited, “Future Beauty” is the exact vision and message of Japanese fashion that Fukai wants the rest of the world to know – no more and no less. Steele, perhaps cognizant of her American audience (as well as the FIT student body), has presented her own interpretation of Japanese fashion that is in many ways more in-line with American values and tastes through its emphasis on youth, democracy and individuality. Ideally, a visit to the MFIT exhibition would be coupled with a visit to the Barbican exhibition. The two exhibitions, with their disparate foci and approaches actually complement each other, bringing a fuller understanding of just how revolutionary and influential Japanese fashion was, and still is, both inside and outside of Japan.

Japan Fashion Now is on display until April 2, 2011.

Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion is on display until February 6, 2011.

Sarah Scaturro

Body Unbound: Contemporary Couture from the IMA's Collection

This post is long in the making. I have been meaning to review the exhibition Body Unbound: Contemporary Couture from the IMA’s Collection at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, as it ties in with themes explored in my Ph.D. on the grotesque in fashion at the turn of the twenty-first century, which I recently completed at Central Saint Martins

However, having not yet been able to visit the exhibition in person combined with the fact that it closes January, I figured for the moment, to at least mention its central theme and participating designers as sketched out in the museum’s accompanying literature:

"Body Unbound: Contemporary Couture from the IMA’s Collection, examines the many ways designers have manipulated, transformed and liberated the female figure. The exhibition will feature ground breaking designs by Rudi Gernreich, Issey Miyake, Junya Watanabe, Thierry Mugler, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Gianni Versace and other avant-garde fashion designers. Body Unbound will explore how these designers used modern construction and unexpected materials to contort, conceal, reveal or mock their wearers.

Fashions by visionaries Rudi Gernreich and Jean-Paul Gaultier illustrate how some designers played with the notions of shape and construction, challenging mid-century ideals of form. Examples by Issey Miyake and Junya Watanabe, based on the theories of androgyny and “universal beauty,” demonstrate how Japanese designers working in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s promoted an alternate way of styling the body, concealing its contours and silhouette. Pieces by Thierry Mugler, Gianni Versace and Franco Moschino display how designers utilized innovative textiles and subversive design elements to toy with the concepts of seduction and femininity."

The exhibition is on view through January 30, 2010 and the IMA will be its sole venue.

Virgin Knitters at the Textile Arts Center

Hall's father first scarf.

The Textile Arts Center, the founders of which were recently interviewed by Sarah Scaturro in Fashion Projects, is hosting a collaborative exhibition by Kimberly Ellen Hall titled "Virgin Knitters."

The exhibition is the documentation of a project started in 2007 for which Hall taught a number of people how to knit in exchange for their first project, a scarf. The project was inspired by the Buddhist notion of Wabi-Sabi, which can be partially understood as the appreciation of something specifically because of its imperfections.

That is how Hall explains the project:

"The virgin-knit scarves have both an emotional and aesthetic appeal. A virgin-knit scarf draws in the wearer through the knowledge that the knitter worked hard making it, while the aesthetic appeal stems from the ideas embodied in Wabi-Sabi, a Japanese concept of beauty. The idea that there is beauty and power in an object that is not precision made or the result of years of experience seems an important one today. It's easy to agree that everything is mass-produced, cheaply/quickly made these days, etc.—an antidote to that can be found in craft. But we often find at the other end of the spectrum is artisanal and labored handwork that can be a put-off when deciding to learn to make something for the first time."

Kimberly Ellen Hall is an artist and designer with an interest in the intangible qualities of textiles. She holds an MA in textiles from Central Saint Martins in London, and has designed on both sides of the Atlantic from Hussein Chalayan to Coach.

For more information on the exhibition and the accompanying programming, among which is a lecture by Sabrine Gschwandtner on November 11th please visit the Textiles Arts Center site

Kimberly Ellen Hall, Virgin Knitters Exhibition at the Textile Arts Center

"Japan Fashion Now" Symposium at the Museum at FIT

Two fashion conferences are taking place in New York--only one week apart from one another. The first, the "Japan Fashion Now Symposium," is taking place on November 4th and 5th in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition at the Museum at FIT, the second at Parsons the following week (see below).

Among the participants to the "Japan Fashion Now Symposium," in addition to MFIT director and chief curator Valerie Steele and deputy director Patricia Mears, are Brian McVeigh who will speak on the personalization of students' uniforms in Japan, Sharon Kinsella who will talk on the transformation of cute in Japanese subcultural fashion "from naive subculture to Grotesque Parody." Similar themes might transpires in Laura Miller’s presentation titled "Perverse Cuteness in Japanese Girl Culture."

Royal College of Art: Department 21

Department 21, Royal College of Art.

Among the year end shows that I visited in a rather happenstance manner this summer, the one I found most stimulating was that of the Royal College of Art in London. Off to the side of the exhibition space was what looked like an outdoor seminar room which was, in fact, a self-built outside deck and the “exhibition space” of Department 21, where a series of free lectures and workshops took place concomitantly with the show. An entirely student-run initiative, Department 21 was started to promote new models of art and design education and interdisciplinarity. Its name plays on the fact that are 20 existing departments at the Royal College.

Throughout the year, the founders took over a temporarily vacant space at the college where students were assigned studio space regardless of their departmental affiliations and where a series of lectures, seminars, critiques and presentations were developed. They also published a small book to recount the project.

In their own words: “Department 21 appropriated institutional territory to explore alternative models of education and to create a new kind of conceptual and social space. […] Department 21 adopted a radical strategy towards a broader definition of education, of practice and of disciplinarity. As an autonomous space, it encouraged a greater critical awareness of the students’ role within the institution.” (Polly Hunter, Bianca Elzenbaumer and Fabio Franz edited, Department 21, London, June 2010)

Francesca

PS Also, on the topic of design education, you might be interested in reading my short interview on Ecouterre on teaching sustainable fashion.