Noir Kei Ninomiya (Q3528)
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Noir Kei Ninomiya is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Noir Kei Ninomiya |
Noir Kei Ninomiya is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Three weeks of overstimulation, under-sleeping, and air-kissing will play havoc with your immune system. As the lights went down at today’s all-purpose CDG venue, bronchial coughs ricocheted around the garage. Our eyes got familiarized with the dimness as an archetypically unfamiliar Ninomiya entity floated from backstage: Clustered around its human host was a pomegranate-like comb of cloth-covered pods illuminated from within by the dim, rosy glow of shrouded filaments. What resembled a bronze kettle or watering can rested on the host’s head.During the opening phase, Hakushi Hasegawa’s soundtrack was a series of gloopy sonic exchanges that reminded me, alongside Ninomiya’s pinkish and endearingly alien DIY shapes, of an old British kids’ show calledThe Clangers. A black rose outfit—black-edged mesh petals—and then a look of smaller blooms whose silver chicken-wire petals were edged with bloody red resin (a little Venus flytrap) came past. More bronze receptacles rested above.Parted-lips-shaped panels kissed their way across metal or leather harness grids worn over tulle in scarlet or black. More lip grids in leather-looking material encaged the wearers before a series of multi-belt bikers. Morning coats bisected by garter-belted cavities opened at the wearers’ guts, and then later, a leather-shoulder cloak/topcoat with a pearl-edged rib-cage detail seemed to hint at a heartbreak narrative lurking somewhere between the gloomy bouquets, kiss-smothered cages, and viral shapes. It all was a fresh verse of wearable metaphysical poetry, romantic this time, from Kei Ninomiya.
28 September 2024
A bombastically cheesy male American voiceover artist—he sounded like he was unveiling toaster-ovens, jet skis, and other Big Prizes in an old school TV game show—announced each look by number as it came out. Around halfway through, his intonation warped to sound more like a Looney Tunes character falling off a cliff: “seven-teeeeeeeen.” By look 24, he gave up altogether. Instead a preschooler repeated “OK” over the percussive soundtrack which—along with the flower motifs we saw on the models’ pimped Reebok Instapump Fury sneakers—had Daisy Age overtones.This colorful twistedness on the audio mixed beautifully with the visuals in what was Ninomiya’s most overtly playful collection yet. Entitled Iridescence, it was a departure in both color and texture and, Ninomiya said in his note, an exploration of reflection. He applied his weird science to that process to generate a cast of psychedelic kawaii avatars in Burning Man couture who were mind-meltingly mesmerizing to watch pass by.Some were surrounded by an aura of twisted multicolor wires—they looked like aesthetically vandalized electrical relays in humanish form. These wires were then twisted into floral outlines and embedded in froths of tulle. Rainbow feathers cascaded in colored clusters over more tulle or above a macramé bodice. Tufted clusters of synthetic pastel ‘hair’ were set in a black grid of more cotton candy material over layered pink tulle skirts. A marine green paisley brocade jacket worn over black shorts and under a harness of twisted chrome wire came in a section that seemed truest to this designer’s recurring surrealist punk codes.There was an excellent section that played satin-shine olive quilted country wear against emergency orange highlights that included a standout orange armed mega-weave bomber jacket. Then the green quilting came framed in articulated trellises or bolted together floral-shaped metal slivers that were coated in a rainbow of many-colored reflective finish. A dress-shell of what looked like opaque stick-on gift-wrap was followed by two magnificent pieces, a capelet and a dress, Spirograph meets stained glass sections. The closing look resembled a human that had been swarmed by floral shaped insects. These were clothes that ripped the fabric of your conception of clothes: garments from a parallel but way more playful dimension. Heading out onto the rainy gray boulevard afterwards felt like a savage comedown.
2 March 2024
Was the first look a camp executioner, BDSM ballerina, or dark fencer? The abstract intricacy of Kei Ninomiya’s artistry defies characterization: it’s a mood. This collection contained a broody heart-to-heart between metal and skin, accented by the metal-plating makeup that bloomed across the models’ faces (when unshrouded) and visible if you looked at the gleaming saw-edged metal strips and braces clips that tethered together the leather and fabric outfits. The guttural soundtrack—a sort of inchoate whale song—was perfectly chosen.After that opener, the first section seemed to embark on a dark subversion of masculine evening wear. The black and white of night attire was pulled inside and out, then totally reimagined in looks that exposed the architecture rather than the facade. Elastic braces of an almost baroque level of complication trellised tulle shirts and skirts, harnesses and an inside-out tuxedo. There was a comprehensively crashed and customized biker jacket, of course. The striped socks that accented some looks were almost comically conventional, Pippi Longstocking curveballs.A “dress” made of white frilled and sometimes black tulle-edged collars and cuffs signaled the shift towards Ninomiya’s signature metier: the creation of visible auras. These demanded metaphors, variously resembling loofahs, minimalist flower arrangements, kitchen scourers, callistemon plants, or a magician’s puffs of smoke. They were mesmerizing to watch pass, and represented a return to Ninomiya’s Noir origins: the color of the last few seasons was gone. This designer inhabits his own space, and lots of it. This was another technically dizzying, imaginative tour de force.
30 September 2023
Noir means black, yet today Kei Ninomiya presented in Le Marché des Blancs Manteaux—the market of the white cloaks. Hence, even before the off, we knew there was change afoot. Perspective-wise we could have been minuscule or gigantic. These clothes could have been molecular studies,moltomacro in a microscope, deep-space examinations via space telescope, or entirely fictional propositions. As usual, with Ninomiya, they were unlike anything else.The opening looks of silver-petaled flowers extending beyond more conventionally shaded blooms set the tone. Ninomiya said backstage he had been working toward a “blooming,” and this was evident in the explosively anti-noir purples, blues, and reds that began this collection. For some reason, suddenly freed of his defining bridle, Ninomiya jetted toward a profusion of blossoming ideas.Foam-threaded tied florals bounced fulsomely around the wearers’ bodies as they bloomed down the runway. Net dresses and metallic-finished polyester strips wound again around the physical forms within them, like beckoning blooms. The molecular explosion at the end only emphasized the clear point of attraction. If only, though, this designer could articulate more: These are clothes with something to say.
4 March 2023
Ah, Noir. After many months away, Kei Ninomiya’s Parisian congregation regrouped in the Oratoire du Louvre to reconnect with this dynamic youngster in the Comme des Garçons stable this morning. While we waited for the show to begin, one of the photographers in the pit fell asleep—everyone agrees this has been an overextended Paris Fashion Week.Backstage, the designer’s mohawk remained as proud as his collection remained ineluctably compelling. He said it was about expressing “mystical forces.” From the quad-teapot-handled look of the opening to the fairy-dandelion explosion of the last, this was a collection that reveled in supernatural wearability.One surprise was the Englishness of it. Houndstooth- and Prince of Wales–patterned sartorialism—sometimes expressed in jackets rucked French-ly high. A collaboration with Hunter boots took this collection on an unlikely diversion to hunting, shooting, and fishing territory. Asked about it, Ninomiya seemed bemused. A translator said: “Well, of course their culture is respected a lot—it’s very strong. In order to create new things, we need to think about traditions from the past.”The models wore headpieces that at first seemed like lumpen, juicily colored tiaras and crowns meant to reflect the apparent courtliness of the clothes. The Noir aspect was upended this time by a diversion into teal explosions of strapped tulle upon seamless, riveted, body-framed exoskeletons. Black whorls of catapult rubber spiraled around the wearer. A frock coat was framed by waterfalling panels of ruffles. And so it fell. There was, naturally, a touch of tinsel and the hint of a biker. Welcome back, Noir; hello, darkness, my old friend.
2 October 2022
Conversationally, Kei Ninomiya tends to be amongst fashion design’s most taciturn protagonists. This can be frustrating when pumping him for intel post-show in Paris, but becomes a slight bonus when—as again this season—that show is in Tokyo.Without any chance of extrapolation, you were left again to wonder at a collection you could see gracing either Helena Bonham-Carter or Edward Scissorhands (but ideally both) were they ever to go out on a date. The first two looks, a top above a black tulle skirt and a fitted-ish dress with a slighter tulle trim, were fashioned in what looked like quilted panels of square spires that were longer at the hip, shoulder, and elbow. These were colored in a 3-D, pixelated, mostly lilac mishmash that suggested, perhaps, there was a blown-up floral photoprint lurking somewhere.This seemed confirmed by the floral shirting—so radically bourgeois for Noir—that lurked beneath some of the series of black tailored pieces that followed. These were intersected with long zippers across the body that allowed them to be worn like a creatively peeled banana. A high jacket whose front skirt was divisible by lines of vertical zippers was also particularly cool.Two long black dresses, one cut narrow, the second flowering outwards at the skirt, were enframed like a choice piece of tropical fruit in a supportive lattice, this one of leather. Then came a double-coated look, short over long (a slight theme this season), that semi-obscured more supportive structures in buckled leather strapping at the legs. A little tangle of this strapping returned in harness form above another black tulle skirt. More tulle followed, first black, then pink, in more full petticoat skirts south of cropped and multi-zipped bikers.Two highly enjoyable Yeti-goes-to-prom looks contrasting pink tulle against what looked like a typically riotous Ninomiya fabrication of shaggy strips of material followed. Then a chlorophyll green phase returned to the idea of latticing, almost cellular in structure, worn with a marvelously punky high-court judge’s wig in the same green. The final trio was an almost all-noir confection; first a dress of furred spikes that resembled some kind of sensual burr, second a hooded dress in a bottlebrushy texture, and finally a piece that seemed to encase its wearer in a bouquet of black, white-piped petals.
9 March 2022
“For this collection, black is expressed through shadows,” said Kei Ninomiya in his notes. “I wanted to express the ephemeral strength and beauty of things that are present around us although we cannot see them clearly.” The show was held in Aoyama, Tokyo, at the Commes des Garçons headquarters, so many thanks to my colleague Saori Masuda ofVogueJapan who was in the room, and who fed back via email: “The atmosphere was very light, in a good way, with a good, positive vibe.”Ninomiya has experimented with non-Noir color previously, most often via brilliant botanical worn installations that were absent today. Instead he expressed his notion of black’s shadow by creating a series of pieces in beige. The idea of something casting a paler shadow than itself implied a reversed polarity of some kind, and the paler procession of pieces did indeed mostly cover the still-breathtaking territory we have seen Ninomiya explore before. Sometimes, as in Look 15, they also looked to break new-for-Noir ground.Two more novelties were the use of woven hemp in rope-adjacent, wearable structures and the first written branding, beyond the garment label itself, that I’ve ever seen featured on Noir’s clothing. The name of the brand was used to make rough white-on-black stripes and checks, which was fine enough on pants, shirts, and cycling shorts. When applied to a more sculptural piece, however, such as Look 9, this branding felt pretty extraneous; for who else could that dress be by but Ninomiya?
7 October 2021
Kei Ninomiya places such excitingly unfamiliar silhouettes and surfaces in front of us that it’s hard not to turn to comparisons beyond fashion’s familiar sphere. Did those first looks featuring thin, stainless-steel spikes resemble gothically ethereal cacti? Was the ragged cylinder of tufty organza atop silver Church’s Mary Janes at the close some wearable bottlebrush or burr?Entitled Metal Couture, this collection initially majored on those spikes (great for nonnegotiable social distancing). The spike section coincided for those lucky enough to be in the room with a musical composition entitled “Tranquilizer”: These fierce, conceptually punk assemblages for sure threatened injection. A brace of black clusters of puckered organza (sea sponge–ish) preceded a more conventionally readable passage of costume in which Ninomiya ran dark creative amok among 19th-century silhouettes in a manner not unadjacent to his boss Rei Kawakubo, playing harness against ruffle, ruche, and skirt. The music at this point was entitled “Transcendence.” As it shifted to “Transparent,” the designer in turn shifted articulation back to his more specific school of fabulously abnormal wearables.
23 March 2021
In March 2016, after his second Vogue Runway–covered show, Kei Ninomiya was asked the lazy reviewer’s go-to question. “My inspiration?” He answered: “No inspiration!” Ten seasons on and transplanted temporarily from Paris to Tokyo, Ninomiya’s spiel remains consistent. According to the notes accompanying this collection its title was “Theme: No theme.”Not quite though: For over those seasons Ninomiya has developed the distinctly dramatic schematic that marks him out not only as a member of the Comme des Garçons family but also as a designer of great individuality.Ninomiya’s sew-free construction techniques—he prefers rivets, snaps, or grommets—again this season allowed him to build a series of handmade hyper-extravagant dresses, all of which would be perfect for a Björk album cover or a Nick Knight shoot. Grandiosely modern silhouettes were delineated in materials that included (in order) wire, pearl, PVC, chain, “tube” (from those notes), a symphony of polyester fabrications, ribbon, satin, cotton, wool, three types of leather, and taffeta, with which the amazing aura-haze of the last look was constructed.Notable in the notes was that the four varieties of this-season’s collaboration with the Prada-owned English shoemaker Church’s were allotted more descriptive energy than the 24 looks worn with them. But then these florally studded footwear options are the most straightforward way, along with his biker jackets, to buy into the Ninomiya aesthetic. That aesthetic continues to develop meaningfully even if, just like his mentor Rei Kawakubo, Ninomiya remains shy to the point of retiring when asked about it. This was another extreme no-theme collection from the heir apparent.
21 October 2020
Set to writhing roils of fretful guitar, this extraordinary Noir collection from Kei Ninomiya felt perfectly timed for a fearful moment. Ever since he first appeared during spring 2016, Ninomiya has slowly expanded his stitch-free wearable sculptures, building grander and ever more unsettling architectures. Today he again pushed forward into new territories—maybe even a new solar system—while working for the first time with Icelandic installation artist Shoplifter (aka Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir) as well as his long-standing floral art collaborator, Makoto Azuma.Shoplifter added a fresh element to the interplay between Ninomiya’s materials and Azuma’s botanicals. An artist whose chosen material is synthetic hair, her works include the cover of Björk’s 2004 album,Medúlla, and the mind-blowing installation in the Icelandic pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale.In his usual enigmatic manner, Ninomiya had said this collection was mostly about the color red, in that as paint it can be mixed to create black. To me it looked like a series of decorative arrangements created by some alien aesthete in which the human and the floral were intertwined by hair, pin, and fabric. The metallic woven check fabric that was folded and whipped like air-filled ice cream around the body vaguely resembled a florist’s bouquet wrapping. The fronds of palm, succulent, tuber, and bamboo that nuzzled and nudged their way through and around Shoplifter’s hairy extensions created an impression of human and plant grafted together and slowly devouring each other.Ninomiya’s materials included golden wires that furled like unearthly waratahs around the wearer; interconnected safety pins built into pearl-linked globes or an entire dress; red feathers; strips of rivet-connected red tulle; and lengths of brass-colored steel wool frayed, then wrapped in transparent PVC and braided to resemble enormous Viking wigs. Those safety pins (also gracing a fine new shoe collaboration with Church’s) and the tartan section signified a punk undertone also present in the guitar: Ninomiya’s usual biker jacket motif was retired for the season, but he hit the fringe trend via a couple of apocalyptically enormous black pieces. The closing titanic fuzzball was at once hilarious and ominous—part dark cloud, part hyper-expressed protective aura, all Noir.
29 February 2020
Along with yesterday’s Issey Miyake show, this Noir Kei Ninomiya outing felt a fashion equivalent of petrichor—that heady scent that fills the air as the first rains fall after a long dry spell. Whereas Miyake was about attitude, Ninomiya was about amplitude. Atop their Church’s Goodyear welteds, the models seemed to walk in clouds (of tulle), or huge clusters of black foliage (in black tape), or in huge chunks of spiky salt crystal (in some white resinous material I couldn’t identify). Noir builds spaces around the body that feature incredible volumes that defy easy description: From the side, Look 13’s leafy headdress and huge backward-stretching skirt of greenish strips made the whole look resemble a tropical-themed Sideshow Bob–headed horse piñata.Ninomiya, rarely loquacious, this season said he was aiming for a reset, then mentioned “basics” which made us all laugh. He added: “It was a beginning. Actually I wanted to focus on creation… back to the basic mind of creation... I want to make something new and start something new.” Although he is determined not to be referential, Ninomiya does have his codes and here, again, we saw the perfect jacket used as a template for longer chain-strapped dresses with open backs.The penultimate dress was made of metal-linked transparent snowflake pastels and the last a linked circular tier that resembled a 1980s chandelier. Azuma Makoto’s hats were made of real ferns, palms, and moss and worked as a finely landscaped complement to the Ninomiya dreamscapes below. As the womenswear calendar revolves to a new decade, perhaps the ideas that will come to define that decade are already beginning to swirl, coalesce, and anticipate the shape of things to come.
28 September 2019
This was Kei Ninomiya’s third Fall collection on the trot dedicated to a floral theme—this time, the rose—and it was arguably the headiest of the lot. To be able to approach this subject, perhaps the most harvested in womenswear, and emerge with a fresh perspective is a testament to the designer’s particular vision and unique technique.As the first looks stalked forth from backstage, we were hit with a gust of rose scent—this was not being pumped into the Salle Wagram, Ninomiya demurred afterward, but came entirely from the hundreds of roses insinuated into the models’ rosy red wigs by Azuma Makoto. Those first outfits were a series of dramatically silhouetted black honeycombs achieved by Ninomiya’s stitchless riveted technique that came layered over lighter, soft pink trellis-like shells. Dark tendrils spiked from the outer layer into lighter substance of inner like a fierce, unpruned invasive climber.Next we saw a multi-look mixed bouquet dedicated to Ninomiya’s home turf: bikers, tuxedo-topped pleated aprons over black pants, and halter/harness attached shirts of spikily abstract triangular panel skirts around which were overgrown more wildly sculpted thickets of dense black bloom. A black apron—the skirt did not encircle the entire circumference of the human—was made from long, tapered, pillow-like panels, which seemed a slight aside from the rose theme but was alluringly new in itself. Two looks came with a pair of irregularly woven ovoid baskets of black stem-like links, one surrounding the arms of the wearer, the next enveloping the legs. A purple rose brocade sprouted from one petal-cloud skirt before a final flourish of hyper-volumized signature Ninomiya sculpted fabric pieces in soft pink and black that rustled as they passed. The funereal, the romantic, the spiked, the soft, the wild, and the cultivated were all perennial rose-associated characteristics arranged anew via Ninomiya’s distinctive dialect of poetically conceived fabric stanzas.
2 March 2019
It’s amazing what you can learn on a long ride to the outskirts of town. Henri Lefebvre, the gent after whom both the show venue and the street it lies on are christened, was a situationist critic and thinker whose works include 1974’sThe Production of Space. He also wrote ofdétournement—the diverting from one function to another—of spaces and art forms relative to the humans inhabiting them.Kei Ninomiya is a space-maker who uses radically different techniques to construct gauzily mind-bending structures around the inhabitants of his clothes. Today, in Lefebvre’s long, light, raw-bricked space we sat awaiting Ninomiya’s. The backdrop was white, and the carpet was black. The gent charged with keeping it totally black before the show was less than chilled about performing his duty.As soon as the first look emerged, we understood why: The headpieces that appeared at first to possibly be detergent foam were, in fact, built from thousands of tufted seedpods. Whether in Mohawks or accentuated rocker quiffs, or courtly wig-like or helmet-esque in their shape, each one left a trail of floating tuft that slowly sank to the carpet or glided on the slipstream gusts of the passing models.Ninomiya’s fundamental space is the blackness his line is named after and the perfecto archetype he so often returns to. These are spaces that have been previously inhabited by many other designers—and indeed still are—but in Ninomiya’s hands, thedétournementis radical and comprehensive.A perfecto-fronted harness with cross-body back straps and two panels of tulle at the hem was worn over a tulle-and-pleat-layered skirt. Another biker shirt had articulated arms of black undulating panels layered against each other like a semidetached armadillo. We saw huge, densely clustered ruffled dresses made in black-edged clear PVC and attached to one another by rivets. Others were made of concentric curling lines of stiffened black tape similar to an old cassette tape. Usually a material hidden within the fabrication of his pieces, Ninomiya put metal—or the appearance of it—in several pieces in woven metallic fabric and an oversize tulle that looked like fine chicken wire. An amazing suite of closing looks was built of hand-size, stiff, winglike panels attached to the internal bones of the garment by curved antennae.
Some of the looks resembled post-punk 18th-century court dress—Amadeus on acid—but mostly, they defied categorization: This collection was too inventive, too original to be confined by definition into one preexisting space.
29 September 2018
Held in the Faculté de Pharmacie de Paris, Kei Ninomiya’s first full show was a powerfully effective prescription—a dose of genuinely fresh creative innovation delivered to a business that craves exactly that medicine. Ninomiya’s previous presentations in the Comme des Garçons headquarters were silent, small, cloistered affairs: They gave him space to refine his work, then he outgrew them. Along with the stern stone busts of bearded French chemists that lined the venue, this show was watched by an audience that had tripled in size. The addition of music and the beautiful floral masks by Makoto Azuma complemented the dramatic power of his clothes.Look 1, Look 6, and the final six were the most dramatic expressions of Ninomiya’s trademark technique. He folds, scrunches, or layers sections of tulle, organza, or polyester that are attached without stitching onto poppered grids. The grids act as the girders around which he constructs extraordinary silhouettes. Around these, he arranged bikers, trenchcoats, and a great bulbous duffle coat sometimes paneled with faux fur or ridged with more bristling reefs of fabric. A knit dress hemmed with two macrame-linked loops gently bounced with its wearer’s walk.Like Rei Kawakubo, with whom he began his Comme career as a pattern-cutter, Ninomiya, 33, loves biker jackets. Here, they came in a cropped pleather, diamond-stitched, above a great wide-pleated polyester diamond-stitched skirt or armed in fur and scattered with a little blue floral—the first non-noir decorative motif this black-obsessed designer has shown.Another characteristic Ninomiya shares with Kawakubo is steadfast taciturnity when it comes to talking through his work. “It’s always the same . . . what can I say? I use the contrasting elements and things to make a new power . . . I want to make a new atmosphere, a new feeling.” Ninomiya’s Noir did that today: a terrific show.
3 March 2018
As illustrated by Kei Ninomiya’s final look, this designer deserves a bigger show space and, ideally, a more amenable time slot. The piece was a tutu with a matching helmet built on a base of PVC and hemmed with metal. On top, this designer built the latest variation of his fabulously fastidious no-sew construction technique, attaching reefs of ruffled gauze. It was a super show closer, yet the impact of its entrance was stalled somewhat when the model was forced to tilt her metal-hem just so and shuffle sideways to fit through the narrow doorway from the backstage corner of this top-floor showroom.Before it started, my bench-mate got involved in a game of Noir bingo: ornate bikers, bikers with transparency, sculptural dresses assembled via strips on mesh harnesses—all our predictions were hit, clean and true. Add to that some hand-sewn synthetic knitwear that emerged straight from the eyeleted sections of the semi-transparent mesh they were sectioned against, ruffle-snap aprons, and a few pieces in black floral jacquard that preempted 3-D florals on a biker made of horizontal pleather strips and harnesses, and dresses in symmetrical rose-like whorls of more fabric. The designer said afterward that he sees the white in his collection more as space than a color—look at the opening dress of black-piped, pressed strips to see what he means. Which leads back to the start: Ninomiya’s space explorations deserve both more, ahem, space in which to perform and a larger audience to perform to.
1 October 2017
Before fashion, Kei Ninomiya studied French literature. Was today’s shock addition of scarlet to his hitherto all-black oeuvre some tribute to Stendhal? No, apparently. “Red makes black strong, and also, it was about flowers this time,” explained Ninomiya.The first salvos of scarlet came by way of jackets constructed from modular patches of red and black faux fur linked by ring and rivet, which came worn over fur-trimmed culottes or triple-layer tulle skirts. Ninomiya’s defining garment, the biker, came in a black fur fabrication with a wide shaved check on the body and a tighter check on the lapel. The impact of that color—previously Ninomiya had said he had no reason to work in anything other than black, so it really was a surprise—had barely receded when he threw in leopard-printed collars and hems on long gauze coats and dresses. Then came flower-embroidered lace linked by zigzag embroideries to velvet-bodied sweatshirts, coats, and bomber-neck dresses. Leopard print? Florals? This was radical conservatism. An all-black, wide-legged, quilted boiler suit with more bomber-jacket detailing at the neck featured a black-on-black jacquard in some hard to fathom floral—Ninomiya said afterward it was neither rose nor poppy, but something imagined.Two looks that would have seemed outré if delivered by almost any other designer—a black upholstered modular shell of thick stitched faux-leather panels so broad the model had to edge sideways out of the door to the runway and a shoulder brace along the same lines (worn above another layered sheer dress in red)—felt business-as-usual here. A pretty red-and-black embroidered bomber worn under a twisted pinafore skirt immediately afterward, by contrast, felt surprising.At the conclusion, we saw two solid, volumized pieces fashioned from shiny twists of a stiff, shiny, and red metallic sheet—which looked a little like enormous raspberries if you squinted. There were also some signature modular dresses and jackets whose membrane of faux leather and rivet held together pretty whorls of sheer fabric that resembled black blooms. It was interesting to watch this designer blossom beyond the confines he had previously set himself. This collection should bring new eyes to Ninomiya’s work without shocking—at least too much—those who have already come to enjoy it.
7 March 2017
Kei Ninomiya’s modular, stitch-free experiments with form and volume are dark but not necessarily severe. As a colleague noted after this show, certain looks here are as close to the conventional notion of eveningwear as anything in the Comme des Garçons ecosystem. These included the opening looks of gray-to-black frothily synthetic furls snapped to a riveted circular framework of plastic panel; a fringed midlength dress with two shoulder-borne accordions of fabric whose folds were separated by lines of pearlescent beads; an irregular fluted dress in denim with a lattice detail on one side; and a Ninomiya signature dress of paper-chain loops of intertwined nylon ribbon.The designer said he’s been visualizing his work as frames for the people inside them, most literally here in two bulbous cloaks of stiff nylon mesh riveted into a lattice. Bikers featured voluminous shoulders of clipped-together strips or chained-together Venetian blind–like concentric circles of nylon around integrated sleeves. Ninomiya’s debut denim pieces included that sculptural dress and a frayed-hem top-pocketless chore coat with a gunmetal-riveted check effect: This was such an attractive elevation of a staple that I asked if Ninomiya ever considered producing menswear. Annoyingly, he laughed and shook his mohican in dissent.Studded-suspender supported skirts in heaped filo layers of satin-nylon fabric; mesh-armed and -backed bikers with black floral twists clipped in across the shoulder; and latticed jackets and trenches were just a few additional highlights of this darkly dreamy collection.
3 October 2016
The time: Sunday morning, precisely 9:30 am. The place: the highest garret of Comme Des Garçon’s Place Vendôme temple. The event: a solemn presentation of Noir Kei Ninomiya’s fashion philosophy. The atmosphere at this show is rigorously serious. In silence, hard lights illuminated a capacity crowd. Every cough, sniff, stomach gurgle, shutter click, keyboard stroke, and phone alert resonated like a church bell in this small, bare room. For 26 minutes, six models changed everything but their Repetto flats as they cycled back and forth wearing a collection by Kei Ninomiya that had evolved as significantly as his mohawk. Techniques included macramé of polyester strips to construct elegant, perforated dresses, stud-fixed leather patches puckered into place alongside each other to fashion 3-D dresses and chest pieces, and mixed material knits whose elements included loosely woven, semi-rigid industrial flex.The biker jacket—a recurring Kei Ninomiya reference—returned but was decorated either with mimosa blossom embroidery at the arms (a motif expanded in a two-button, notch-lapel topcoat and the velveteen matte on satin sheen pattern in black dresses and tops) or concentric arcs of faux metallic studs that diffused the further they stretched from the shoulder. One other extraordinary biker was made of delicately embroidered concentric circles of stiff shiny thread. Two opening pieces featured intermeshed ribbons of faux fur and faux leather, and a few near-the-end dresses were made out of hundreds of studded-together scalloped black polyester strips whose leaf-like rustles filled the hushed room as they entered it. The right-side of one plain black dress was fashioned out of a bulbous, seemingly woven, smokey-gray synthetic whose contours were achieved by internal stitching. The same finish quilted the back of a high-shouldered duffle coat that followed immediately after.Bikers aside, there was a greater proportion of less grandstanding, volumized pieces here that included a gorgeous but quiet mini-series of mid-length dresses seamed from gently-nipped waist to bosom featuring ruffle-fixed panels of a slightly longer length at each hip. These were echoed in similarly buttressed wide pants. Micro-herringbone—black on black —and the faintest chalk stripes added a softly masculine flavor to similarly silhouetted dresses, which were compelling in their round-necked, pleat-fronted, schoolmarmish severity.
Shirts featured embroidered micro-studded details at the cuff as a gentle reference to the plastic four-faced flashes on that earlier biker. A black mac with wide-laced pocket seams was as quietly nonconformist as a black wool topcoat that dissolved from solid material into cut away strips. This was an ingenious exploration of the boundaries of material construction, adroitly punctuated by many thrown-on—but not throw-away—propositions. When asked, Ninomiya said: “My inspiration? No inspiration!” Fair enough: He doesn’t really need one.
6 March 2016
And now for something completely different.Kei Ninomiyais quietly and painstakingly riveting together a darkly wonderful body of work. This collection contained more of his inky-black intricately engineered dresses made by bolting scores of curled polyester organdy strips, rendered flowerlike in shape, held together with a skeleton of tiny studs. The dresses contain not a single stitch, and float around the wearer. Ninomiya’s shapes were more adventurous this time than last, and featured jagged sculptural protrusions. He has also discovered that when he turns these pieces inside out there is a different texture to their beauty. These are amazing, but challenging to wear, signature pieces.A touch lessLady Gagabut no less dense-with-effort was the dress containing a twist of 7,000 hand-applied beads that took two people three days to construct. “That was the longest,” said Ninomiya. A biker jacket of transparent vinyl worn over some pinstripe culottes was stitched together with a macramé of plastic cord; another biker was decorated with jagged lines of more transparent plastic; and yet another biker, with a satin sheen, featured arms constructed of Ninomiya’s signature studded organdy, whose segments undulated over each other and strongly resembled a raven’s wings. “I make things in a new way,” said Ninomiya. And so he does, rather brilliantly.
4 October 2015