Keisukeyoshida (Q4918)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Keisukeyoshida is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Keisukeyoshida |
Keisukeyoshida is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Let’s start with this: Keisuke Yoshida is one of the best womenswear designers of his generation working in Tokyo today. This has become clearer and clearer over the past few seasons, but tonight he confirmed it.We rode up the cramped elevators of a rather creepy office building to a vast disused hall on the 13th floor. As the models appeared at the far, far end of the room, the slow grumble of what sounded like a jet engine started, and crescendoed into a roar as they approached. Even from afar you could make out the models’ stewardess hats, their swaying hips and stiletto stride, but it took a full minute before they reached us. The anticipation!When they did they were wearing strictly tailored pencil skirts, lustrous and lightly crumpled blouses in cobalt, black, cream and crimson, and ironically mumsy dark floral prints. Extra fabric from the dresses wrapped tightly around the neck or brushed the floor as trains, and silky nightdresses had connecting jackets that dangled cape-like from the shoulders (more on those later). Later, the crushing music was interspersed with emergency sirens and, at one point, a muffled scream.Forget the trad wife; Keisuke Yoshida’s woman is the protector, the breadwinner, the teacher, and the mother all at once. Contrast her image with the men this season, on whom the jaunty little hats became infantilizing, their sock suspenders, thigh-high shorts and belted dresses serving to emphasize their softness against the apex women beside them. Maybe it was that the silhouettes this time were sleeker, or the gentle way the fabric clung and creased against the body, but this season Yoshida’s clothing felt more beautiful and more convincing than ever.Backstage, Yoshida was breathless after having run the length of the hall to take his bow. The easiest of designers to interview, there is no need to ask questions; everything just flows out of him. The muse in his mind, he said, was an imaginary maternal figure he has mentioned before. “Although she’s not my mother, she is somehow like a mother to me. I’ve been thinking recently that the process of making a collection is hard, and so I like to think she’s somewhere worrying about me,” he said. There is also an undeniable sadomasochism about this figure; she is there to punish, but also to kiss it better. “That strictness and sense of love are combined, so even though she looks very stern, there’s also some tenderness there,” he explained.
Yoshida said that this season he’d stopped trying to create something completely new and had instead looked more deeply into the tailored jackets and overcoats that his brand has become known for. “Whenever I create a collection, I first create a mood, then a human figure, and then I start making the shape,” he said. He experimented with cutting a hole in the lining of a jacket and then trying it on the body. “The lining stuck to the body, and it looked like bondage or an elegant dress,” he said, taking off the jacket he was wearing to demonstrate. Sure enough, the sheeny lining inside had been slashed away, transforming into a completely functional dress with the jacket still attached. Unexpected, practical, and also kind of revolutionary. Has it ever been done before? If it has, then certainly not as well as this.Yoshida said this collection felt akin to shedding his skin. And that seemed to be it. In both himself and in the clothes he makes, Yoshida found an opening and burrowed inside—a caterpillar going into a chrysalis. With this collection he emerged, fully-formed and ready to fly.
9 September 2024
Keisuke Yoshida held his fall show on the campus grounds of Rikkyo University, a private Christian institution where the designer went to school as a child. For 16 bittersweet years Yoshida, now 33, shuffled around this place, and tonight the memories of that forlorn little boy came back to haunt it once more. The runway was set down the long path leading from the gate into the school’s cafeteria, and the twilight sky filled with the sound of pipe organs as we waited for the show to begin.From the outset, the collection was heady with the fumes of academia. Starting with perfectly pressed school uniforms and neckties, it moved to teacherly tailoring, delicate silk blouses, and mumsy floral dresses. A boy scout uniform was made from waxed cotton, whilerandoserubackpacks (the square-shaped ones that Japanese schoolchildren carry) were transformed into adult-appropriate leather handbags. Buttoned-up trench coats and satiny shirts clasped high at the neck, while cassock-like dresses complete with dog collars covered the body, or were slightly unbuttoned from the bottom to allow flashes of leg and pointed heels to peek out. In one look, the vicar garb appeared in a black leather jacket, fitted close to the body and tucked into a tight leather pencil skirt. Long leather belts trailed on the floor like threats of punishment. There were bright blazes of red, and a deep purple symbolizing Rikkyo Academy, a color “burned into Yoshida’s eyes since childhood,” according to the show notes.The idea of showing at his alma mater had been on Yoshida’s mind for a while. “I’ve been having recurring dreams around once a month—nightmares that I keep failing in school, and it brings me back here,” he said after the show. “Then I wake up and I realize I’m an adult and I’m relieved, but there’s also a strange feeling that I can’t quite shake.” It was the unnameable texture of this feeling that he’d explored, and doing so had shifted something in him: “I felt that I was more in touch with my core this season,” he said.A sense of forbidden eroticism, the elegance of adults in the eyes of a child, the slow violence of spent youth—he laid it all out with disarming emotional depth, and managed to transform these difficult feelings into wonderfully dignified clothes. The path ahead is long, but Yoshida’s inner child can rest easy tonight: he’s passed this season with full marks.
18 March 2024
“I’ve had an image of this woman in my mind,” Keisuke Yoshida said on a chilly November afternoon while explaining his new collection at a showroom in Tokyo. “In my head, she’s wearing an outfit, and I can’t tell if it is a wedding dress or a mourning dress. But somehow, I know that she’s like a mother.” Last season, Yoshida’s imaginary maternal muse had been a strict, teacher-like figure with fabric clasped tight across her throat, but this time she’s come undone.Yoshida had engineered her transformation through feminine staples, using ivory silk blouses and soft, dusty pink tailoring that bared the chest, while lapels and collars were inverted or twisted so that they poked up in awkward directions, as though they’d been pulled on in a hurry.Old wedding dresses Yoshida had found in Tokyo were reworked into one-off corsets, lace gloves, and trousers, so that embellishments of pearls and sparkly lace glistered over hands or raced across the thigh, while broken ceramics served as earrings alongside seductive secretary specs. Best of all was a would-be office-appropriate pencil skirt, out of which peeked a silk camisole whose straps dangled upside down towards the ankles. Like more than a few collections this season, it was totally perverse, and all the more charming for it.Those theatrically spiky stilettos and wide-brim hats could well have evoked Irving Penn, or old photographs of Parisian couture from the 1950s, but what makes Yoshida’s work feel right for the moment are the strange quirks he sprinkles in to humanize everything, offsetting any old-world glamour or preconceived notions of feminine mystique to create something delicately twisted—like those intentionally messy collars. Perhaps what it was really about was finding some softness and comfort in the chaos. That's something all of us can aspire to.
28 November 2023
Keisuke Yoshida is one of Tokyo’s brightest young fashion talents. This season he closed an overall strong Tokyo Fashion Week with a collection that felt like he’d leveled-up. The 32-year-old designer has spent the past few seasons wrangling with his own design identity, making clothes about his internal struggles. This time, he put himself in another person’s shoes, and by doing so managed to unlock a new level of depth.By chance he’d met a 17-year-old fan, who came to see a talk of his. The boy, who was with his mother, was wearing one of the designer’s popular and impactful trench coats, and said that after being suicidal, his love for Yoshida’s clothes—which his mother had bought for him—had saved his life.“Every season I face myself and delve into myself to make things, so it was encouraging to me that what I was doing was helping someone else,” Yoshida said backstage. The designer related to that boy’s feelings—he found solace in fashion after being bullied as a young person himself. Inspired by the relationship between the boy and his mother, Yoshida began by making a collection that spoke to the affectionate power of a feminine guardian.Working with the Paris-based stylist Léopold Duchemin, he came up with a way to nod to that image of a gloomy boy and the mother-like figure that protects him. “We kept using the word ‘strict,’ and thought that this collection needed to be strict, like a family, a lover, or a teacher,” said Yoshida.That narrative came through in the ‘lonely’ and ‘love’ motifs painted in white and red on latex vests, and in more serious pieces like the vampish dresses or tailored separates, as well as office-gray coats with power shoulders, all tempered by the tender glamour of the silk-satin skirts and shirts beneath. On some looks, the satiny lining of the coats wrapped around the neck like blouses, in a way that seemed to suggest the inside coming out, while that incredible black leather trench coat added a Matrix vibe that somehow felt fresh.He had named his collection “THE LAST” after a note he’d scribbled early on in the season, but watching the show it felt like the start of something new. Yoshida’s boy muse himself opened the show, while the Japanese supermodel Kiko Mizuhara closed it with the song “Young and Foolish” playing over the speakers.
There’s some finessing Yoshida needs to do in the finer physical details—some of those silhouettes on the upper half could have been sleeker—but now that he’s raised the bar, keen eyes in the wider industry will be watching how he continues to mature. That will come with more responsibility, more exposure, and perhaps more success. But oh, to be young and foolish again.
20 March 2023