Attachment (Q3785)
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Attachment is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Attachment |
Attachment is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
You can usually tell a lot about a man by the clothes he wears, but not if Koki Enomoto has anything to do with it. The Attachment designer makes it his business to remove any predictable or cliché details from his menswear and attempts to render something harder to define. Clean tailoring; sharp lines; total restraint.Take the MA1 bomber jacket this season—which isn’t really an MA1 at all. The zip still slides up the tricep, but pockets and ribbing are eliminated so that it no longer telegraphs standard-issue military wear, but instead offers a kind of sartorial carte blanche. “The key for me is not to plant unnecessary information on the person who wears it,” said the designer during a preview at his Tokyo showroom.Clothing is visual language whichever way you slice it, but in an era where we’re all expected to brand, brand, brand ourselves into oblivion with what we wear, say, or post online, the proposal to shrug it all off is tantalizing. What if your clothing didn’t give away endless information about you? What if you don’t want to wear the cerulean sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room? It’s an impossible idea to execute fully, but you only had to feel the sumptuous cashmere blousons or slip on the shirts made from fine Suvin cotton to understand: These are clothes that serve the wearer, not the algorithm.Enomoto also had some fun furnishing the collection with personal touches in the silver hardware, taking the square case of his Rolex Cellini watch as a reference for the buckles that glinted on belted trousers and jacket ties; ditto the scarf rings, which were a nod to the interlocking silver Tiffany band that Enomoto wears on his pinky finger. “I wanted to incorporate some of my own individuality directly into the clothes. These are my personal little ‘attachments,’ things that are part of my daily life,” he explained.That trivia likely won’t reach the people who end up buying Enomoto’s clothes (unless they read this review first), but that’s hardly the point. Instead, it’s the suggestion of humanity they impart, and the generosity of spirit. “Attachment can perhaps appear cold, but behind that I’m trying to create an image that is as warm as human skin,” he said. A too-literal translation there, but one that sums up what Attachment is about, and how Enomoto is evolving it. In absence, abundance.
14 February 2024
After his fall 23 show in the basement of Japan’s National Stadium, Koki Enomoto looked up at the curve of sky visible from the stadium roof, and snapped a photo on his phone for prosperity.Enomoto is Tokyo’s minimalist designer of the moment, and the photo he’d taken reminded him of collages by one of his favorite artists, the American minimalist Ellsworth Kelly. It was a typically clean segue into this season, which is devoted to edges—the edges of clothes and the edges of the body, and how they relate to one another. “I really felt responsive to the lines and proportions in that photo, and wondered what it would be like if I applied that to clothes,” he said.In the lookbook Enomoto used to present this collection, the models appear like cutouts: sometimes far away, sometimes close, Attachment’s characteristically chic-yet-streetwise tailoring throwing no shadows on the liminal background. Here and there the lapels of jackets or waists of (beautifully cut) trousers are accessorized with a reflective plate of rounded metal hardware, another nod to that curve of sky in the photo.Though Enomoto is a lofty thinker, he’s also a logical one—he makes clothes about clothes, not about art—and so he concentrated on the extremities of the clothing directly, subtly exaggerating the cuffs on the trousers or adding an extra hem to the bottom of a pair of shorts. It was a simple enough twist that gave the whole thing extra dimension, and rescued it from feeling too plain. “If you add another hemline, it creates another edge,” he said.Like many ambitious Tokyo designers, Enomoto has his sights firmly set on showing in Paris. This season he broke away from Tokyo’s main fashion week (which will be held from August 28) to release his collection closer to the international men’s schedule; that way he could close orders quickly and get a head start on the next season. “Things are going well overseas, sales are good and the business is growing,” he said. “I want to take an approach that will bring us a little closer to the rest of the world, even if only by half a step.” How far he can push the edges of his own future, time will tell.
17 July 2023
Attachment’s fall show played out across the running track in basement of the Japan National Stadium, a suitably industrial space for Koki Enomoto to present his work, which moves in the realm of uber-restrained simplicity.Enomoto was appointed to his position by Attachment’s founder Kazuyuki Kumagai (who launched the label in 1999) and has headed up design there since the spring 2022 season. It’s uncommon in Japan for a designer to take over a brand that isn’t their own, explained Enomoto, but he’s in his third round at the brand now, and finding his stride. “At first, I was under a lot of pressure and thought too much about taking over the brand, but the number of people who understand Attachment is increasing, so I feel I can be more creative. In that respect, the pressure is lightened.”That newfound psychological freedom allowed him to showcase his flair for pared-back clothing that sings in the details (the “attachments” that the brand is named for). “This collection delves deeper into the concept of simplicity, and the sense of distance between people and clothes,” he explained. So the jackets were intentionally unlined in order to be closer to the bare skin, and the loosely-fitted pajama shirts had an elegantly undressed quality, while the subtle pops of pistachio and lilac kept it from feeling frigid.Enomoto works on a cerebral plane, subtracting extraneous design details and adding new touches. He achieves this with a sniper-like precision, which this season was most clear in the asymmetrical collarless coats in the first and last looks, whose necklines he had made to look as cleanly cut as possible. It was a good example of taking something away, and gaining something better.
16 March 2023
The hottest commodity in fashion at the moment? Trust.Especially at a time when luxury markups are being called into question, not just on quality but morality, what else is more important than feeling confident that the brand you’re buying into isn’t taking you for a ride?Koki Enomoto had been thinking about that sense of trust this season, and intended this spring collection for Attachment as an expression of the promise a fashion designer makes to his customers. He called the collection ‘swear.’ “We have a rule not to design excessively, and that is our promise to Attachment fans,” he said during an appointment at his showroom in Tokyo. “We promise to make very simple things with high-quality materials, and we will continue to do so, no matter the circumstances.”This time that meant loose-looking suits (many without lapels), sophisticated sweats and some beautiful buttonless shirts. Some of the jackets and shirts were closed with silver chains and fastenings as a physical manifestation of that promise (silver hardware is a common thread in Attachment, and adds welcome flourishes to the brand’s otherwise hyper-minimal clothing).Enomoto also spoke about paying more attention to his choice of fabrics this season. “The first priority is that they feel good on the skin, and that they can be worn for a long time and are convenient and practical,” he said. A good example this season was a subtly fluffy T-shirt made from a short-pile jersey that had been shaved down. “Normal pile fabrics tend to lose their shape, but by making the ground out of polyester, they have a bit of firmness, so they can keep the same shape even after they’ve been washed,” Enomoto said.A pinky promise is serious business in Japan. When making one in the playground, school kids will chant the equivalent of “if you’re lying, you have to swallow a thousand needles.” Brutal, sure, but it fosters a commitment to being honest. In today’s fashion landscape, that counts for something.
1 August 2024