Kishin Shinoyama didn’t only shoot nudie twins in black & white, he also for instance did this wonderful early print campaign for Issey Miyake … in 1969!

“… it is the mask that has acquired a body” - Watsuji Tetsurō (Mask and Persona)

Between 1987 and 1999 Irving Penn photographed over two hundred and fifty Issey Miyake garments, never deviating from his formula of empty white backgrounds and frontal lighting that emphasised the pure geometric forms of the clothes. Miyake adhered to a self-imposed rule to never attend the photo shoots, and Penn never went to a Miyake fashion show – such was their respect for each other’s work. A new exhibition at 21_21, the Tokyo design museum directed by Issey Miyake, looks back over the relationship between the fashion designer and the late photographer, and the legendary images that resulted. The entire wall of the atrium space in the subterranean concrete Tadao Ando museum is covered in Ikko Tanaka posters from the archives while in the main room a seemingly endless procession of larger than life figures is projected on a thirty metre wide screen, resembling a silent infantry of hilarious beautiful aliens.

A tribute to the seven stages of human civilisation in Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy of anthroposophy, the sound, light and beeswax sculptures pictured above are currently installed at the Yokohama Museum of Art, for the Yokohama Triennale. They were made by Yukinori Maeda, father of art-fashion-publishing cult Cosmic Wonder. Some of his previous work is reproduced below …

Above these words is a Comme des Garçons wedding dress (AW1990-91) made from fabric lining. Below is a hooded bride at a Shinto wedding, and below that is Comme des Garçons SS2012 – unveiled in Paris last week, photos courtesy style.com. Then there’s the Russian stratovolcano Maly Semyachik.

The fabulous and tragic Isabella Blow in Wizard of Jeanz, Hiroaki Ohya’s 1999 fashion project. Books open into garments: intricately folded red polyester ‘published’ in 21 volumes …

Having worked at Issey Miyake for ten years, Kazuaki Takashima launched his own label Né-net in 2005. His AW09-10 collection was presented at a boxing stadium in Tokyo, where masked models entered the ring to a backing track of Barack Obama’s presidential oath.

Digitised fragments of the pre-www Comme des Garçons magazine Six that have made their way onto the www via The Clark and this fine archive.

Earlier this year Comme des Garçons announced the end of their Tao label that had been headed by Tao Kurihara since 2005. These here are some of her hand-made paper garments from SS07, paired with white polo shirts and gloves …

Another Comme des Garçons artist collaboration: Cindy Sherman in 1993/4 …

While Einstein declared that his theory of the Cosmological Constant was his “biggest blunder”, recent work in physical cosmology is suggesting he might have been right after all. In any case, it’s a deeply pleasing phrase. Cosmological Constant. Cosmological Constant. Um, here are some pics from Cosmic Wonder’s circle-ridden fashion project Light Source …

Keeping the scrapbook spirit of Rei Kawakubo’s old magazine Six alive, print advertisements for Comme des Garçons Shirt have featured cave paintings, comics, birds, trucks, Pet Shop Boys lyrics, 1970s porn, 16^th century Flemish painting – seemingly anything but shirts. The current campaign presents specially commissioned disco canine sculpture by Simen Johan (above), while last year it was a series of Stephen Shanabrook and Veronika Georgieva’s paper surgeries (below), disfiguring and reconfiguring faces in much the same way that Kawakubo’s fashion has strived to disfigure and reconfigure bodies.

This lovely thing is known as E8. It’s one of the most complicated mathematical structures ever. A polytope with 248 dimensions and over 13 billion mirror symmetries, it cannot be seen in its complete form. First identified in 1887, it took 18 researchers four years to finally map its inner workings, using a supercomputer at the University of Washington. In 2007 their results took up 60 gigabytes of data and they told us that if the algebraic equations were written out in small print they would cover an area the size of Manhattan. Apparently E8 might be able to tell us something about the structure of the universe, and help tackle the bizarre unknowns of string theory. Marking the first time in decades that geometry had made major headlines all on its own, the news was testament to the potentiality of new geometric discoveries that are only made possible by computers.

In new news-worthy news on the geometry front, the 17th century Japanese folk art of origami (ori for ‘folding’, kami for ‘paper’) finds new technical application in 132 5, the first clothing line Issey Miyake has presented in over a decade.

Made from a single piece of cloth (the “1”), each piece has a 3D form (“3”) that emerges from a 2D (“2”) shape with the gentle tug of a string, and can be worn in multiple ways (“5” – the hypothetical fifth dimension of physics).

Using polyester fabric made from recycled bottles and pressed with metal foil, the range was inspired by the work of Japanese computer scientist and techno-origami artist Jun Mitani, and executed in collaboration with the engineers, mathematicians and pattern makers at Real Lab.

132 5 was shown last month at the Tokyo design museum directed by Issey Miyake, 21_21. For images of the new 132 5 store by Tokujin Yoshioka see here.

Thin ladies with telephones. Parasols, wall paper, hues of sepia. The latest Theatre Products collection was unveiled with the help of these things.

Also by Theatre Products: inflatable tablecloths, the label’s Tokyo boutique Stripe and a new print campaign …

Yoshikazu Yamagata of writtenafterwards just brought his heavenly fashion show of the gods to Sydney and Melbourne for Big In Japan. Here’s a look at his most recent – ever so slightly more commercially viable – collection crime and punishment, treated as an outdoors exercise in retribution …

And here is Yoshikazu with his gods at the Big In Japan Melbourne event last week:

Big In Japan! installation images by Amelia Groom, all others courtesy of writtenafterwards.com

Rei Kawakubo’s fashion has always been metafashion; an interrogation of the system of this strange thing called fashion, while being very much a part of it. Early in her career she got international condemnation and praise for designs that exposed the hidden anatomy of dress and expressed an undoing of the process of construction with things like holes, loose threads, exposed stitching, unfinished hemlines and lining placed on the outside of garments. The dress above is part of the Comme des Garçons AW2009-10 collection, one that marked a welcome return to this interrogation of the materiality of fashion as well as its very structure. Something like jewellery is stitched onto the surface of the dress, and then covered by a second, flesh-coloured translucent surface so that it is no longer external, but not entirely internal either.

Continuing the concealed / revealed and inside / outside play, the footwear for the collection brought to mind the surrealist René Magritte’s series Le Modèle Rouge. Magritte said that people ‘always wanted to see what lay hidden behind what they could actually see’ and his shoes, like these ones, remind us that our feet and the things we usually wear on them are heteromorphous. When fashion’s hidden inners are brought out to the surface like this, we are asked to think about how everyday dress entails not just clothes being adapted to bodies, but bodies being adapted to clothes.

The introverted pearls dress is currently on show at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York where the exhibition Japan Fashion Now is showing until April next year. To coincide, the museum held a symposium on Japanese fashion and are releasing a book, also called Japan Fashion Now, published by Yale University Press. Some installation shots from the exhibition:

Top: Comme des Garçons, dress, AW2009-10, Japan, collection of The Museum at FIT. Installation shots: 1. Undercover (Jun Takahashi) ensembles. 2. Comme des Garçons (Junya Watanabe) dresses, ensemble, and jacket; Comme des Garçons (Tao Kurihara) corset and coat far right. Photographs courtesy of The Museum at FIT.

Upholstery, spots, Snoopy, shadows and beauty pageant queens came together in Fur Fur’s new collection that was just unveiled at Japan Fashion Week in Tokyo. Stay tuned for more JFW highlights.

Rei Kawakubo’s somber schizophrenic aliens ended up splitting and doubling themselves on the Comme des Garçons runway in Paris yesterday, where gaffer tape was the guest of honour and colour was not invited …

The company also just launched their first official website archiving some of the collaborations they have done in recant years with artists including Mondongo, The Quay Brothers and Ai Weiwe:

I looked up The Future on Google Image and it doesn’t seem to have changed much since the 1980s. If only we had left the future in techno-couturier Junya Watanabe’s hands – it’d be much more unstable, and therefore trustworthy.

Several seminal pieces from the Comme des Garçons protégé, including that beautiful, absurd ruff (above), are to be included in Future Beauty, the major survey of Japanese fashion from the last three decades that is about to open at the Barbican in London.

Running for four months from October 15, the exhibition will coincide with a public program of talks, performances, workshops and events, including Framing Fashion and Architecture, a look at “the reciprocal relationship between Japanese fashion and architecture in structure, display and desire” with the exhibition architect and designer Sou Fujimoto.

Future Beauty will also travel to Haus der Kunst in Munich  from March – June 2011.

Contrary to popular belief, clothes are not practical and dress is not necessary. Thomas Carlyle’s Professor Teufelsdröckh told us in the mid-nineteenth century that ‘The first purpose of clothes was not warmth or decency, but ornament… among wild people we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes’, and he found resonance with a certain supercilious feline in Meji Japan, Natsume Sōseki’s nameless narrator in his novel I Am a Cat who mused that ‘human history is not the history of flesh and bone and blood, but a mere chronicle of costumes’.

Opening next month at The Barbican in London is Future Beauty, a major survey of avant-garde Japanese fashion from the last 30 years, curated by fashion historian and Kyoto Costume Institute Director, Akiko Fukai. Organised around four themes – blackness and shadows; flatness and form; tradition and innovation; street style and popular culture – the exhibition will explore the unique sensibilities of Japanese fashion since the early 1980s when Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto proposed a radically new fashion aesthetic.

Emerging from Japan’s post-war economic and industrial boom, Miyake, Kawakubo and Yamamoto emphasized playfulness, textile innovation, sculptural volume and freedom of movement ­– defying the bright, body-conscious glamour of the lycra-loving early eighties and often referring back to Japan’s rich visual heritage. Their works will be presented alongside their successors including Comme des Garçons protégé Junya Watanabe, as well as Jun Takahashi of UnderCover, Final Home by Kosuke Tsmura, Tao Kurihara, Matohu, Akira Naka and mintdesigns…

Images from top left:

1. Rei Kawakubo/ Comme des Garçons. Autumn/ Winter 1995. Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute. Photograph by Takashi Hatakeyama.

2. Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons. Autumn/Winter 1983-84. Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute.

3. Mikio Sakabe. Autumn/Winter 2008-09. ©MIKIO SAKABE Co.,Ltd.

4. Issey Miyake. Spring/Summer 1995. © Anthea Simms.

5. Isabella Blow in Hiroaki Ohya. Spring/Summer 2000. Photograph by Mika Ninagawa. © Mika Ninagawa, Courtesy of Vogue Nippon and the Executors of the Isabella Blow Estate.

6. Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons. Spring/Summer 2007. © Anthea Simms.

7. Final Home / Kosuke Tsmura 1994. ‘Final Home’ Coat. Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute. Photograph by Takashi Hatakeyama.

8. mintdesigns. Autumn/Winter 2008-09. Courtesy of mintdesigns, photograph by Yoshitsugu Enomoto, hair and makeup by Tetsuya Kamo.

9. Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garçons. Spring/Summer 2008. Courtesy of Comme des Garçons, Ltd.

10. Rei Kawakubo/ Comme des Garçons Spring/ Summer 1997. Collection of the Kyoto Costume Institute, Photograph by Takashi Hatakeyama.

After focusing on abstract geometric forms for the last few seasons (with collections including “○△□,” “凹凸,” “SILHOUETTE,” and “ALPHABET”) the 2010-11 A/W collection from Anrealage marks a return to the body.

But it’s not the limited notion of the body that is usually propagated by fashion; to articulate the conceptual grounding of the collection entirely new bodies had to be made. Mannequins were produced with distorted height-to-width ratios and dressed in garments that interrogated the adjectives wide, short, slim and long by playing with the contextuality of proportion. All details – including the buttons, labels and hangers – were adjusted to fit the new ratios, and by forming different standards a long skirt could become a short skirt and slim trousers could be made wide.

Removed from the stretched and squashed dummies, the garments take on new shapes of their own that adapt according to the wearer. In the words of the designer Kunihiko Morinaga, the idea behind wideshortslimlong was that that “the body as a measure for clothes must be reexamined; without changing this ruler, new clothes cannot emerge.”

“Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents ­– that is the key to fashion leadership. Ill-fitting is always stylish. But be more creative ­– wear your clothes inside out, backward, upside down. Throw bleach in a load of coloured laundry. Follow the exact opposite of the dry cleaning instructions on the clothes that cost the most in your thrift shop. Don’t wear jewellery – stick Band-Aids on your wrists or make a necklace out of them. Wear Scotch tape on the side of your face like a bad face-lift attempt.”

Fine fashion advice from John Waters. In his very excellent new book Role Models, the king of trash dedicates a chapter of hyperbolic praise to Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, who he refers to as a ‘magician’, ‘tyrant’ and ‘god’. Fashion is the perfect place for ugliness and beauty to co-exist, and Waters is in awe of Kawakubo’s innate understanding of bad taste. He describes the decadent pleasure he gets from the ‘hidden lunacy’ of her over-priced couture, and how he enjoys wearing it inconspicuously in his favourite Baltimore dive bars. He eloquently rants through several highlights of Kawakubo’s three-decade career, including the audacious ‘Quasimodo’ lumps-and-bumps collection where she padded out the body in all the wrong places (pictured above in a stage production by Merce Cunningham), much to the dismay of the fashion press.

He also proposes an absurd John Waters Comme des Garçons pop up store in a Baltimore stripper’s apartment, recalling the guerrilla retail model set up by Kawakubo that saw stores appear in abandoned buildings away from gentrified areas in cities that were often off the fashion map entirely, including Helsinki, Athens, Beirut, Stockholm, Glasgow, Reykjavik and Krakow. They were founded on the principles of spending an absolute minimum on interiors and being open for no more than one year. Below is the perfume display at the Warsaw guerilla store which opened in an old fruit and vegetable shop. John is a fan of the Comme des Garçons ‘anti-perfume’ Odeur 53 which is supposed to combine notes of oxygen, metal, washing drying in the wind, mineral carbon, sand dunes, nail polish, cellulose, pure air of the high mountains, burnt rubber and flaming rock. “That’s exactly what I want to smell like!” he says, “how did she know?!”.

Dai Fujiwara had worked at Issey Miyake as a textile engineer before he took over as the company’s creative director. He developed the line APOC (‘A Piece Of Cloth’) with the concept of a single potentially infinite yarn spun into rolls of fabric, in which entire outfits would be cut out by the consumer. There was no sewing, no seams, no embellishment – raw material went in one end of the machine and compact finished product came out the other.

As the video above shows, Fujiwara’s passion and obsession is basic yarn; he is looking for the elemental lines of all forms, especially the human body. The clip also demonstrates how the company is continuing to explore the ideas about movement, the body and basic geometry that were first posed by Issey Miyake in the 1970s. And now compulsory look back at the long and fruitful collaboration between Miyake and the late fashion photographer Irving Penn …

Besides writhing around in spew of rainbow this messy man also does drawings. Lovely ones. Australian label Rittenhouse have collaborated with him on a capsule collection available now at Poepke in Sydney, where there is also a window installation of his work. Ancient Peruvians would cover their mouths with their hands when they saw a rainbow so as to prevent it from rotting their teeth, but you don’t have to do that. None of us have to do that.

“All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players / They have their exits and their entrances / And one man in his time plays many parts …”

Considering they’ve unveiled past site-specific collections in an office furniture display room, a luxury day spa, a stretch hummer, a shipping dock and a rural dairy farm, one never knows exactly what an invitation to a Theatre Products event will lead to.

For their last collection ‘Boutique’, friends were invited to Tokyo’s Mitsukoshi department store where we were directed to the theatre on the sixth floor, which happens to be the oldest surviving theatre space in Tokyo and the site where the city’s first fashion show was held.

We were then assigned a team and taken on tours of the legendary building with the resident department store tour guides who told us the history of the site (while Tokyo has been completely annihilated several times with earthquakes, wars, floods and fires, Mitsukoshi has miraculously remained since the seventeenth century) and the architecture (including the thousands of prehistoric fossils embedded in the walls), and led us to a performance at the huge old pipe organ.

Arriving back at the theatre on the sixth floor, we were asked to come on to the stage where we faced out, looking at the empty seats, our invisible audience. Then the designers talked everyone through the collection, piece by piece. Besides several Australiana motifs like a kitschy-cute koala print, a running theme of the collection is the Mitsukoshi department store itself:

The designers Akira Takeuchi and Tayuka Nakanishi started collaborating on costume design for theatre in 2000. Wanting to form a label that would treat fashion as theatre, they joined with Kao Kanamori (whose background is in performance) in 2002 and started Theatre Products.

Their aim is to consider clothes not as fixed, pre-existing objects, but as things that are formed only contextually, through the process of being worn. According to them, fashion exists not in physical commodities but in the interactions of bodies, spaces and experiences. To articulate the idea of fashion as live and participatory, their projects have often played with the idea of interactivity – like their installation/shop at Rice Gallery where they built a carnival tent out of pieces of clothing, requiring customers to tear items away from the architectural structure, rendering their act of consumption a performance. The project was launched with a concert by the 17-member horn and percussion band Chanchikitornade, with images of clothing factories projected on the walls.

They have often collaborated with contemporary performing artists and ensembles, including ‘Japan’s smallest magician’ Mame Yamada, and KATHY, the faceless dancers who came to Sydney for Big In Japan last December. They also worked several times with the legendary art director Nagi Noda, creating the 100 identical dresses for this wild clip for J-pop star Yuki.

Top image courtesy Theatre Products, other photos by Amelia Groom.

A side effect the aging population in Tokyo is that children’s schools are scattered throughout the city with no children in them. Predictably enough, in recent years a number of these vacant sites have been turned into artist studios, galleries, performance spaces and the like – such as 3331, the buzzing new arts centre in the former Chiyoda Rensei Junior High School in Tokyo’s ‘electrical town’ Akihabara.

It was in the gymnasium of a former elementary school, reformed as ‘Taito Designers Village’, that the conceptual fashion label writtenafterwards unveiled their collection for Japan Fashion Week in October 2009. We sat on the polished floors in total darkness, while smoke machines and the haunted sounds of Icelandic singer Nico Muhley filled the space. Slowly, a succession of senior white-haired white men emerged and earnestly made their way down the catwalk, each one wrapped in 50 metres of white fabric. The designer, Yoshikazu Yamagata, called it The Fashion Show of The Gods. The collection had been ‘made’ the afternoon of the show; there was no real plan, no cutting and no sewing, just the formless forms of volumes of fabric wrapped around the bodies of old men. Aging population indeed.

Over green tea and popcorn at the designer’s nanoscale central-Tokyo studio a few weeks ago, I asked Yoshikazu about the faded saffron-yellow children’s harlequin costume that was hovering over us, and he explained that he had found it as a wide-eyed 19-year-old at Portobello Road Market, and for the last 11 years has hung it up wherever he works as a reminder of why he was first drawn to fashion. After graduating from Women’s Wear at Central St Martin’s in London, Yoshikazu had worked for several labels including Ann-Sofie Back, McQUEEN and John Galliano before returning to Japan and forming writtenafterwards in 2005. He recalls he had never been good at verbal communication and always struggled to connect with other kids at school. He discovered fashion as a mode of expression and exchange that made sense to him; clothing exists next to the body as the most immediate means of communicating. Writtenafterwards was founded on the notion of fashion as interaction, and collaboration with other artists and designers has always been a major part of the label’s ethos.

When Issey Mikaye’s bamboo bodice made the front of Artforum in 1982, it was the first time fashion for fashion’s sake had graced the cover of a major art magazine. By this time, Miyake was well known in both fashion and art circles for his mind-boggling patterns, futuristic textiles and playful treatment of bodies in space. Along with Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, Miyake was part of a radical new wave of Japanese art-fashion. They became known as ‘the big three’ and dominated the high-end conceptual fashion market of the 1980s. Since then, the other chapter of Japanese fashion that everyone knows about is the bright, playful DIY dress-up cultures of Harajuku, as chronicled by FRUiTS magazine in the 1990s.

But Yoshikazu is part of a new generation of exuberant fashion artist-designers who are at present barely recognised outside Japan. Along with Theatre Products, Spoken Words Project, fur fur and Anrealage, writtenafterwars frequently crosses into the realms of performance and installation art to exploit the most expressive, experimental, conceptual and creative dimensions of dressing. It’s a reminder that while fashion might be classified under ‘design’ or ‘craft’ rather ‘art’, in Japan the Hegelian dichotomy between ‘useful’ artefacts and ‘meaningful’ artworks did not historically exist in the same way: a kimono could be an autonomous objet d’art without being separated from or compromised by its utilitarian capacities.

Collaboration has always been such a major part of the label’s ethos. In 2007 Yoshi joined forces with the knit artist mafuyu on the My Town In My Home collection of wearable houses that could double as children’s toys (above), and he has done joint projects with the likes of designer Hedi Slamane (see here), photographer Naoki Honjo (below) and children’s picture book publisher elaelaopa.

Five years ago, Yoshikazu also set up a small fashion school in Tokyo named Coconogako. Unsatisfied with the hierarchical structures of existing fashion colleges in Japan, he believes a teacher should be a collaborator. “I want to be as open as Bruno Munari,” he says, citing the Italian designer, teacher, inventor, artist, researcher and children’s book author as a major source of inspiration, and a reminder that teaching has been a vital part of the creative process for many of the world’s best designers. “Fashion comes from young people; you have to always be open to the untrained.” Countering the façade of exclusivity that usually plagues fashion, he admits school kids (there are some left in the city), young professionals and grandparents alike to create a dynamic and inclusive community for broadening the possibilities of fashion and how it can be defined.

Taking the name from the music/poetry reading nights he was running at the time, Masahiro Tobita formed the label Spoken Words Project twelve years ago. The 2010 AW collection Psycho – Rough Ground was unveiled last week at Vacant in Harajuku where we ate mini frankfurts and Japanese pickles amongst ladders before the designer and his team dressed some models in ever-evolving layers pulled out of cardboard boxes scattered around the room. Tobita, who had studied textile dying and weaving at Tama Art University in Tokyo before training himself in clothesmaking, is known for his excellent graphics, colours and cuts, as well as his art practice in painting and sculpture. The collection is now also on show in the gallery room of the wonderful Utrecht art bookshop.

Photos by Amelia Groom.

Masks by Yoshikazu Yamagata of writtenafterwards photographed by Hedi Slimane for Dazed & Confused Japan.

Lica and Naka met in the early 90s when they were at art school together in Osaka. They launched their first fashion label 20471120 (the name referring to the date when Naka believes “something will happen”) in 1994, establishing boutiques in Tokyo and Osaka the next year and quickly developing a cult following amongst Japan’s flourishing street fashion scene.

By 2000 they were experimenting more and more with reused clothing and embarked on a new venture called Tokyo Recycle Project. During fashion week in Tokyo that year, instead of putting on a show they sent empty cardboard boxes to all the local fashion journalists, with a note inside requesting they send them back a garment from their wardrobe which they no longer wore. After gathering information from each person about their lives and their memories of the clothes they had sent, the designers set about deconstructing and reassembling all the garments they had received, making them into new, more desirable pieces to return to their owners.

The project caused quite a stir in Japan and the designers soon found themselves set up with a Tokyo Recycle Project centre in Harajuku, where anyone could come to see them with their old unwanted clothes and have them remade into something new on site. It was read as a critique of Tokyo’s hyper-consumerist culture, and it encouraged people to form more meaningful relationships with their material belongings, something which Lica and Naka believe is lacking in contemporary life.

In 2001 the pair presented a Tokyo Recycle Project collection based on the reuse of pre-existing garments from UNIQLO (the Japanese mega-brand specializing in cheap mass produced clothing), including a dramatic red dress which was assembled live on their model, as a performance piece (see last image below). Shortly after, they embarked on a trip along the Silk Road from Italy to Kyrgystan, making exchanges for used clothes along the way and eventually releasing a special collection called Silk Road Remix Recycle.

In recent years they launched Zechia, a more orthodox fashion label which still retains the irreverent spirit of Tokyo Recycle Porject and 20471120. Lica (who is also a licensed aromatherapist and has worked as a chief designer at Cacharel) does most of the designing while Naka (who is a practicing artist – some examples of his work above) looks after their graphics and related art projects.

For Spring/Summer 2010 they started the new eco sister line Zechia Hearty, which was shown a few weeks ago at Japan Fashion Week. Using organic and recycled cottons, it features T-shirts embellished with simple messages like “Love Family” and “Keep The Earth” or Naka’s hand-drawn graphics of endangered and extinct species. The duo appeared utterly free of cynicism as they humbly explained to me that they continue to see fashion as offering an unparalleled opportunity to communicate a message, and to change the way people live their lives.

Naka (Masahiro Nakagawa) has a solo exhibition at Gallery Venue in  Denmark next year, including works from the Tokyo Recycle Porject and 20471120 archives.

T-shirts from the new Zechia Hearty line (Spring/Summer 2010).

Tokyo Recycle Project fashion show at The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney (2005).

Tokyo Recycle Project dress assembled from pre-existing synthetic UNIQLO garments (Spring/Summer 2001).

Bringing together two of Japan’s most visionary and free spirited women, an installation from SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima for Rei Kawakubo’s Comme des Garçons has opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.

The spacial design by Sejima is reminiscent of the instillation that was held at SCAF Gallery in Sydney earlier this year, but the experience of the curved and subtly reflective space with Rei Kawakubo’s extraordinary shapes and colours floating throughout is overwhelmingly beautiful. The clothes cease to exist as individual garments and become unified as parts of one work, the full effect of which is best experienced from above, on ether side of the museum’s upper level.

The show makes evident many similarities between the architect and the designer; while Kawakubo shocked the fashion world in the 80s when she presented collections that showed complete disregard for things as fundamental to fashion as finished seams and hems, Sejima is well known for radically reconsidering accepted notions of space and built environments, also demanding thought and participation from anyone who experiences her work.

Separate to the installation there is a section dedicated to the artful interplay between two dimensionality and three dimensionality in Kawakubo’s work. Displaying garments on mannequins alongside photographs of the same garments removed from the body and laid flat, viewers can see how the clothes completely change form when they are on the body. The are virtually unrecognisable in the photographs, reminding us how closely aligned Kawakubo’s work is to the realms of sculpture and architecture.

The special exhibition is part of a larger fashion show at MOT from Kyoto Costume Institute called Luxury Reconsidered. Looking at society’s changing ideas about the meaning and purpose of luxury in fashion, it examines different cultural and historical perspectives including ostentatious luxury, the luxury of simplicity and more personal or intellectual luxury (which is where Comme des Garçons fits in). The exhibition continues until January 2010.

Photos by Amelia Groom

To call it understatement would be an understatement. The Cosmic Wonder headquarters in Tokyo is a supremely minimalist space in the back streets of Aoyama, where everything is perfect and perfectly placed. While it houses their men’s and women’s lines, they’ve overcome the predicament of cluttered display with a technique of ‘non-display’: putting all items behind the white walls. Said white walls are opened up for visitors who are deemed worthy, and the centre also houses their artworks and flawlessly designed publications. On display until the end of this week are original prints from their Cosmic Wonder Free Press Sunday Edition for the current Light Source collection (see below), featuring photographers Laetitia Benat, Takashi Homma, Henry Roy and Mark Borthwick.

A selection of Cosmic Wonder Light Source and Cosmic Wonder Free Press are available in Australia from Via Alley.

There were a few askance glances at fur fur where designer Aya Furuhashi celebrated making a real mess of things, but it was once of the most enjoyable shows of the week. Furuhashi started FUR as a project for “hand-made one offs and action-painting” in 2005, launching it as an independent fashion label the following year. In 2008 the brand name was changed to fur fur and they have quickly established themselves as a favourite amongst Tokyo’s more progressive fashionistas.

A few other highlights from JFW I haven’t already mentioned …

Lots of blue and green with no colours in between at matohu.

White light from the self-trained Junya Tashiro

Bare feet and strong silhouettes at jazzkatze

Menswear included the masculine lace and trimmings from new label ODRADEK (above), and preppy sophstication from HEATH (below).

In other news, a fascinating exhibition of samurai art and armour has just opened at Gallery Shingendo, showing some interesting parallels with the elaborate layering, bold colouring and sculptural forms of contemporary Japanese fashion. I am in love with this ensemble and feel it would be equally suitable for fighting battles in the mountains and drinking strawberry milkshakes in Harajuku, and therefore perfect for my lifestyle.

[Samurai image courtesy Gallery Shingendo. Runway images courtesy Japan Fashion Week Organization]

There are those who would say ‘The Fashion Show of The Gods’ might be an ambitious thing to call your own fashion show – but the smoke, Nico Muhly soundtrack and senior men in volumes of white fabric and hair had us all convinced last night at writtenafterwards.

‘Travelling back in time, when the gods were holding the very first fashion show for the world’s kingdom inhabited only by animals.’ That was apparently the concept behind it all, and it made for a memorable and somewhat hilarious closing show for Japan Fashion Week.

It was held on the sports court of the Taito Designers Village, where the innovative and ever-playful label had also set up a beautiful instillation featuring a miniature scene of animals watching the gods on the runway, as well as lace globes and globe bags …

Photos by Amelia Groom.