Kanako Sakai (Q4892)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Kanako Sakai is a fashion house from FMD.
Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
---|---|---|---|
English | Kanako Sakai |
Kanako Sakai is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
“I’m not good at being feminine,” said Kanako Sakai at her fall show. At her second runway outing after a strong debut last season, the designer spoke about never quite gelling with her gender (or at least society’s expectations of it), and this season served as an exploration of those difficult feelings.Sakai said she’d been reading about Marilyn Monroe’s bullet bra, and then saw Kim Kardashian’s push-up Nipple bra released late last year for her shapewear brand Skims. The designer spoke about how each woman was regarded as a sex icon, and her wonder at how Kardashian has intentionally wielded her sexuality as a selling point. “I’m the exact opposite! I avoid wearing feminine clothes and just cover myself up with jackets and stuff, and I found it fascinating that these other women existed in this way,” she said.It led Sakai to pick up a copy ofA History of the Breastby the feminist historian Marilyn Yalom to learn more (“despite being a woman’s possession, the breast always seems to belong to someone else”). She also referenced Yayoi Kusama’s attempt to overcome her fear of sex by making hundreds and hundreds of phalluses (see her work Accumulations for a good example). “When I thought about that, I realized that I shouldn’t just shy away from the things that I don’t like, but face up to them,” she said. And so she leaned into her discomfort, creating Madonna-esque cone bras, nipple-baring sheer tops, and chaps with heart-shaped cut-outs in the crotch.By themselves, each piece looked incredibly well-made. Sakai’s forte is innovative textiles that she combines with a great eye for color, and she continued to impress on that front. The red furry dress that closed the show was actually made out of silk, and the coat in look 15 utilized a dyeing process from a factory in Kyoto that involved heating sulfur with real silver to create that beautiful metallic effect.Taken as a whole, however, it wasn’t always clear what kind of story the collection was telling, and Sakai’s fascinating theme got a bit lost. Printed on her own T-shirt as she came out at the end (and on some of the looks) was the Walt Whitman quote “I am large, I contain multitudes,” which Sakai loves because it was often adopted by Patti Smith, an icon of hers. It’s clear why she relates, and Sakai herself clearly does contain multitudes. Her challenge going forwards is to learn how to wrangle them.
13 March 2024
Kanako Sakai hadn’t intended to do a runway show this season, to say nothing of opening the Tokyo Fashion Week schedule. Only two years into her label, it was much too early for a show, she said, but after winning the JFW Next Brand Award 2024 in June (which finances two shows for the winner), she was coaxed into it with only two months to prepare. Smiling anxiously as she came out to speak to reporters afterwards, her first words were “How was it?”The important thing to know about Sakai is her knack for innovative textiles, which she travels the length and breadth of Japan to source and create. The last two looks of this collection, for instance, featured iridescent fabrics Sakai had woven from crushed seashells in a technique known as raden-ori. It was inspired by a childhood memory: “When I was in elementary school, I did mother-of-pearl inlay for my summer homework and I thought it was beautiful. Then recently I found out about shells that are from the Sea of Japan in Tango, Kyoto. Previous generations used them to make textiles because they wanted to take the charm of the sea from their hometown and make it into a fabric,” she explained.Sakai puts her identity as a Japanese citizen at the forefront of her work, and this yields some unique results; particularly impressive were the hexagonal patterns of silver sequins, inspired by kamon, or samurai family crests, that glinted like armor on tops and skirts. Elsewhere, tank tops descended into fringed flapper dresses that swished in intense blue or silvery gold, while pink lace peeked out from beneath smoothly slashed tailoring.As fresh as the colors was the casting; Kanoko Sakai is a womenswear brand, but half of the models she used this time were male. “Rather than a woman’s image, there is a human image,” she said, adding that her male friends often buy her clothes. “I was thinking of using about three men’s models, but the casting department sent me 150 people, and after using the criteria of simply looking good and being cool, half of them ended up being male models.” It worked well, and speaks to the forward-thinking designer that Sakai clearly is.So, how was it? In a word: promising. In a few more: You don’t often see a debut runway show as well-executed and confident as this one. Sakai had chosen the word “welcome” as her theme, “as a way to let everyone know the spirit and attitude of the brand.” That spirit came straight out of the door swinging, and kicked off the Tokyo season with a bang.
28 August 2023