Harunobumurata (Q4245)
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Harunobumurata is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Harunobumurata |
Harunobumurata is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Harunobu Murata’s spring collection unfolded on a warm Tuesday evening in the vast glassy foyer of Tokyo’s National Art Center, and served as a continuation of the designer’s stab at high-minded, effortlessly elegant womenswear. His aim is improving every season.Taking the 20th century sculptor Constantin Brancusi as his starting point, Murata sought to make clothing that would feel at home in an art gallery. The white linen dress in the first look, for instance, was printed white so that its folds almost appeared like a plaster statue. That’s not to say it was stiff; these were fluid sculptures that moved with the body, beginning with a wave of white—toga-like dresses, floaty gowns, and bedsheet skirts—before giving way to peach, buttery yellow, scarlet, and black. Pianist Kirill Richter tinkled the ivories in the middle of the runway all the while, providing a tastefully dramatic soundtrack to complement the vibe.Later, a trifecta of looks featuring metallic fabric recalled the iridescent rainbows of spilled gasoline, achieved by covering the fabric with silver foil and combining it with a sulfurizing agent in a collaboration with Nishimura Shoten, a hundred-year-old workshop based in Kyoto. “It’s like a sculpture that is exposed to rain and changes color, capturing the flow of time within a single dress,” he said after the show. There was impressive pattern work on show too, with dresses pinned to the side so that they fell in rich, asymmetric folds, or fine silk blouses with cutouts at the hip.Murata operates largely in the realm of occasion and evening wear, but down-to-earth touches in the form of oversized shirts and light-as-air raincoats were also in the mix. “I started off with this very sculptural approach but gradually changed the styling to make it more wearable and realistic. I wanted it to have the essence of everyday life,” he said. As for how Murata's wearable sculptures will translate to real-life wardrobes, the impeccably groomed Tokyo women who always sit front-row at his shows—their moisturized cheekbones and décolletages catching the light like polished linoleum—are as good an advert as any.
28 August 2024
Harunobu Murata was feeling uncharacteristically anxious after his show this season. Though he blew a kiss to the crowd as he always does at the finale, his usual smile was absent. Had he done enough? “I feel very strange this season, because I’ve tried to do something that’s quite new for me,” he said.No need to worry: It was his best collection yet. After a few seasons of trying to reach some preconceived notion of so-called elegance, and never quite getting there, this time he changed tack. He’d looked to August Sander’s 1914 photograph, “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance,” which depicts a trio of working class men standing in a muddy field, all dressed to the nines in hats and suits, and carrying canes, and found in it a convincing glamou—not of some untouchable ideal, but of real life. “I was tired of expressing straight elegance, and I tried to go deeper,” he said.In practice, this meant that instead of piling on the design flourishes and accessories––apart from a few bags, at least––he pared everything back. The silhouettes were mostly very clean (Murata has design experience at Jil Sander), with muddy brown coats and suits being the standout pieces. He used the same gold disc over and over as an accessory, as a clasp on sumptuous wool suits or on shawls that hugged the shoulders, and dangled rows of small glittering baubles from collars that swept across the chest.Murata still has plenty of room to push things further, but overall it was a great season for him. The new direction lent his clothes an element of what the Japanese call “ningen kusai,” which translates best to the unmaskable reek of humanity. It was all the better for it––true glamour is always more exciting with some dirt thrown in.
12 March 2024
Harunobu Murata is a studious romantic, taking the rose-tinted wistfulness for yesteryear as the starting point of his elegantly minded womenswear. This season, inspiration came from the work of the American photographer Slim Aarons andCall Me By Your Namedirector Luca Guadagnino, and the way they both capture the lazily sensual mood of summers past.The scene was set well, in a beautiful location at the Tokyo National Museum’s Gallery of Horyuji Treasures. An expansive shallow square of water outside the gallery served as the runway, and the cicadas trilled in the surrounding trees as we waited for the models to come out, the soundtrack of Max Richter’sBridgertonrecomposition of Vivaldi’s “Summer” playing into the muggy August air.Unfortunately, as is often the case, the reality couldn’t quite match up to the fantasy. The simpler black dresses in the final looks were cut well (Murata is an alumni of Jil Sander), but many of the clothes looked ill-fitting and busy, while the accessories—bulky bags, stompy sneakers, and chunky necklaces—didn’t so much ground the collection as weigh it down. The overriding impression was one of unintentional disconnect.Success came in the form of a gradiated dyeing process new for the brand, which yielded some impressive jewel-colored dresses that will no doubt be seen come spring. But to more effectively channel Guadagnino-style sultriness, Murata would benefit from paring back.
29 August 2023
Harunobu Murata spent most of his twenties in Europe, where he worked at Jil Sander under Lucie and Luke Meier. He founded his eponymous brand in Milan in 2018 before relocating back to his native Japan, bringing with him a sense of learned European elegance that you rarely see on the Tokyo schedule.His fall show took place under the chandeliers at the Grand Prince Hotel Takanawa, a neo-baroque venue in Shinagawa that he chose because it recalled the Parisian salons where Dior’s Marc Bohan presented his clothes in the 1960s. He named the collection “Women Then” after pictures taken by the American photographer Jerry Schatzberg, which depicted paragons of 20th century female elegance (Nico, Catherine Deneuve, Edie Sedgwick). Still, the collection was no misty-eyed retrospective, but a selection of loose suits and cleanly contemporary coats and evening dresses that managed to retain a sense of unstuffy youthful sophistication that feels right for the moment—a bit like Bohan’s work did at the time.Murata is clearly a perfectionist—his time at Jil Sander taught him how to make minimalism feel emotionally appealing—but the collection’s best looks came from the wilder flourishes he allowed himself. The most effective pieces were the slouchy monochrome suits embellished with vertical slashes of glittering Swarovski fringing that looked like streaks of light.
15 March 2023