[halo;]
[halo;]
Fall/Winter 2011
^ My personal favourite, I absolutely loved the layering ^
For his Fall/Winter 2011 collection Tatsuro Horikawa was inspired by the idea of 'the urban renegade in the cathedral city'. He sought to express the tensions between austerity and elegance, spirituality and modernism, and calm and chaos. The Julius man was now pushed further underground, a piece of the scattered avant-garde, hidden and trying to survive within the immensity of the city. A spiritual calm amongst chaos, the idea behind the new Julius man attempted to capture the very essence of contemporary life. The direction of the collection was one of significant refinement and maturity compared to Horikawa's earlier work. Gone were the overtly harsh, and often highly aggressive, industrial and distressed elements. It was a far more approachable and refined collection than [goth_ik;], indeed the styling was far less dramatic by comparison, resulting in a more serene atmosphere to the collection.
As with most of Horikawa's work I was initially taken by the draping of the looks. Fluidity of draping, with its subtle obfuscation and simultaneous revelation of the body beneath tends to remind me, perhaps rather understandably, of classical antiquity. Such draping is deeply embedded within human dress culture and history, and indeed it is on one level the most basic element of any form of dress. In a way I suppose it helps to tie certain looks to an idea of timelessness, in that such a drape (isolated) could exist in any culture or period, although it was certainly realized in a firmly contemporary fashion. The combination of fluid draping with such strong pieces, such as the collars and leathers, also helped visualize the very tensions that inspired the collection. Here was a man grounded in peace, but one who had to face the harsh realities of the world.
To follow the train of thought that is classical antiquity, I thought the semi-sheer nature of the knitwear piece in the first look I posted was rather interesting. In seeing it I was reminded oddly of the dandy. To be specific my mind conjured the account by Barbey d'Aurevilly of the dandy bent over his coat, scraping the interior away with a piece of glass. The aim was at its most basic level to create a sheerness to the garment, so that it may better cling to and drape against the body (again highlighting that duality of simultaneous covering and revealing). However an indirect, although far more pertinent allusion, was to classical dress, as well the idea of 'nude fashion' that prevailed so greatly the time. Transparency was arguably an attempt to visually transcend materiality itself, and yet, the dandy was in essence fully materialistic. They plundered visual elements of the past in order to create a thoroughly modern identity, and with it they commodified character and personality itself.
I think that same basic idea applies to fashion as a whole. Fashion is routed in the past, if only in that the outcome of all inspiration is based temporally after the inspiration, however it is also by its nature an expression seeking to look forward. With this collection the dialectic between past and present (and by extension, future) was realized not only in this combination of draping and more sculptural and strong elements, but also in its very inception. The idea of the artist or spiritualist (in truth I think they are often following the same path) in the city creates an odd tension between something apparently timeless and something necessarily contemporary. It is tension that is perhaps symptomatic of the modern world - urban life creates a sense of alienation in spite of its ever changing and constantly crowded nature. And what better way to face such a reality than with the appropriate clothing?
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