Chika Kisada (Q2748)
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Chika Kisada is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Chika Kisada |
Chika Kisada is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
This season marked a different direction for Chika Kisada (or directions, plural; it seemed to shoot off in many), and the designer appeared to have surrendered some of her inhibitions. “It’s as if some unexpected place in my heart has been pried open,” she wrote in the show notes. From that place poured a perversity that Kisada hadn’t shown before.There were fewer of the easy casual staples that Kisada has leaned on in the past, replaced with a welcome dose of freakishness and bite. Tailored single-breasted jackets—a strong point for the designer in recent seasons—were the star of the show, in one look appearing to have been dissolved around the neck and spliced with lace shoulder straps. Crinoline flashed from under another, skeleton-like, while corsets flared out theatrically at the hips or clasped asymmetrically, almost violently, at the breast. In one memorable look, a tulle bumbag (from the designer’s ongoing collab with Eastpak) was stuffed under the hip of a sheer dress to warp the silhouette, “Lumps & Bumps” style. The show took place in a cramped concrete basement, and all the while a tulle-clad cellist played—softly, then desperately—setting the tone.Kisada called the collection “Intoxication”, and after the show explained her thinking. “I wanted to create something a little narcissistic that would make me drunk on my own aesthetic,” she said. To do this, she invited a university professor “who studies video expression” to come and look at her collections and tell her his impressions. She also cited the French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey, an early pioneer of cinematography, as a source of inspiration, and spoke about incorporating the “continuity” of movement into her work. The intentionally awkward, sometimes restrictive silhouettes that resulted served to highlight Kisada’s acute sense for the body, which comes from her ballerina background. This time, with the refreshing weirdness this collection brought, she also proved herself a contortionist.
6 September 2024
At the start of Chika Kisada’s fall 24 show, a trio of young ballerinas came giggling down a flight of stairs and sat on the wooden floor, tying up their pumps and stretching out into the splits, before a bell rang and they disappeared upstairs again.The performance was intended to show a memory Kisada had of being a ballerina herself, and the venue—a small studio in Aoyama—reminded her of the place she first learned to dance. “I wanted to convey that the whole show was a place where the memories in my head appeared, so I started from my own childhood,” she said after the show.Kisada’s work consistently touches on ballet, and serves as an attempt to ground the ethereal beauty of the dance form in real-world clothing. Her theme this season was “desert flowers”—things that bloom despite arid conditions—but it offered little in the way of surprises. Knitted leotards were enlivened with tulle, a zip-up jersey top descended into a dress, and tulle-covered bum bags made in collaboration with Eastpak were worn as accessories. The floral prints drifted in an old-fashioned direction, and the sparkling boots—though a different kind of dancing shoes—felt ungainly, taking away the lightness from some of the looks.Chika Kisada’s tailoring is consistently a strong point, however, with clean silhouettes full of poise and elegance, and it’s here that her ballet inspiration shines best, perhaps because it comes from within the clothes themselves rather than as adornment. “I incorporate silhouettes that elongate the spine, and the basic poses dancers make into the patterns,” she said. It means her jackets literally make you stand up straight. To that: brava.
11 March 2024
Held in the grand setting of the Yebisu Garden Hall, Chika Kisada’s fall collection—as all of her work—drew on her background as a ballet dancer. Was something different this time around? Kisada’s designs have thus far been about a powerful kind of femininity; clothes made for women that draw on the dichotomy of delicate, ballerina-esque steeliness. Men had occasionally bought her clothes before (and she had welcomed and encouraged it), but her inspiration and points of reference had always come from women.Over the past season, however, she spent a lot of time with the internationally renowned ballet dancer Haruo Niyama, and when she put him in her clothes, her preconceptions around gender began to shift. “Until now, I was very fixated on working with this strong feminine elegance that was aimed at women, but my time with [Niyama] made me see things differently, and the nuances of my way of thinking began to melt like ice,” she said after the show.Niyama himself danced behind a curtain throughout the show in one of Kisada’s tutus, performing pirouettes and chasées as the models came down the runway wearing sharp and somber tailoring, belted denim jackets, and the designer’s explosive tulle dresses. The most convincing pieces were the MA-1 jackets that Kisada had gracefully adorned with a chiffon-like aura, which struck a balance between the feminine and masculine aspects that Kisada had spent the season considering. One could imagine them being worn by well-dressed ballet dancers of all genders.
14 March 2023
Chika Kisada creates fairy-tale clothes straight from the dress-up box that wrestle feminine elegance with tough-girl attitude. A former professional ballet dancer, she’s pretty good at reconciling the two characteristics; this was Kisada’s first Tokyo Fashion Week runway show, but if you judged the collection by its impressive cohesiveness, you’d never have guessed.A few of the predictable ballet dancer appurtenances were there (swaths of sugary pink tulle, glittering tiaras), but because Kisada’s thing is what she calls “punk ballet,” she also added in bondage-esque harnesses strapped across the chest of floor-length long-sleeved dresses and a slap of leather in a zippy biker jacket. The models were afforded comfy-looking brogues with thick chiffon laces. Hard and soft, playful and serious, childish and adult; this collection was all about the internal conflict one feels when, after longing to be grown-ups when we’re children, we get there and then wonder where all the time went. And so she used nostalgically infantile pinks and blues in gentle fabrics, which were delicately gathered into ruffles or fell down the body in velvety shrouds and contrasted with the gothic black tulle that was worked theatrically into billowy dresses here or textured across a bomber jacket there.The model who closed the show, her face masked by a golden cage, also turned out to be a rather talented pianist; as the other models came out for the final time, she sat down to play a tune from a baby grand at the foot of the runway. “Eventually,” Kisada said, “I want to gather a troupe of real ballet dancers to model my collection.” Let’s hope they’re real punks, too.
27 March 2017