Setchu (Q7916)
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Setchu is a fashion house from BOF.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Setchu |
Setchu is a fashion house from BOF. |
Statements
founder and creative director
Satoshi Kuwata visualizes his collections by sitting in front of a piece of white paper. He doesn’t draw. The silent conversation he has with that flat surface mysteriously brings shapes and volumes to life. For spring, the piece of paper was double-sided in black; cut with a neat slash, the folded-over strip revealed its back side. The paper told Kuwata:Satoshi-san, this season use both sides of your fabrics.“I come from a culture where conceptual design is the base of any art form,” said Kuwata at a preview. “Two-dimensional flat shapes are what Japanese design is about. Kimonos. Without concept I cannot create a garment. Here in your country you are surrounded by 3D renaissance culture. Looking at Western culture I can become more creative.”Lack of creativity will never be a problem for Kuwata. This collection boasted quite a lot of elaborate manifestations of the three key concepts he has established for his young brand Setchu: playful functionality, the artisanal, and timeless appeal. Being cleverly inventive with new fabrics and construction, he’s building a consistent style based on clothes that transform, morph, and adapt. His clothes come with systems of fastening and unfastening that can render what you’re wearing something entirely different. “Restrictions make me creative,” said Kuwata. “If you have restrictions you try to go deeper. I try to go deeper instead of going wider.”Kuwata’s frequent travels and fishing hobby necessitate a certain functionality. His clothes have to be multi-purpose, disassembled easily to be packed light, and look insanely stylish wherever the urge for motion leads. This season, novel shapes and fabrications were introduced, together with a slightly retro hook-and-eye system, bringing the metamorphic potential of the garments to new heights. Examples abounded. A pair of washi paper wide denim trousers could be modulated into three different lengths; the slightly ruched hem of an hourglass dress in washable cashmere could become a cape-sleeved top, leaving the dress shorter and sexier; and a tailored safari jumpsuit can be worn off the shoulders, its sleeves knotted in the back like a geisha bow. Each of the collection’s 28 looks, most of which can adapt to both genders, is a specimen in perpetual identity flux.Kuwata isn’t keen on decoration or flourishes at all, but here he indulged a bit of dash. Recently he traveled to Egypt with his French artist friend Louis Barthélemy.
The inspiration for the trip came from a photo taken at the end of the Edo period, when Japan opened its borders to the West after centuries of isolation. A group of samurais had their portrait taken standing in front of the Sphinx in Giza. It was an image both poetic and incongruous. A manga-style rendition of the Sphinx-samurais situation, made by Barthélemy, was printed in dense colors onto a knotted and wrapped asymmetrical dress, a shirt, and a pair of fluid pants that were the collection’s visual highlights. It was actually the Egypt experience that triggered ideas for this collection. Said Kuwata: The “starting point was: What I would wear if I go fishing on the Nile?”
18 June 2024
There was no mood board at Setchu’s fall preview. “I just started the collection from a white sheet of paper,” designer Satoshi Kuwata said. He crumpled a corner of the paper, leaving the rest intact. It was intended as a self-explanatory gesture: The margin joining the crinkles and the flat surface are the liminal, undefined, borderless space where Kuwata’s (considerable) talent meets its expression.The paper’s crumples served as metaphor for the information conveyed by rich, textured fabrics—tartan, mohair, silk jacquard—while the plain surface referenced humble, modest materials. The tension between polarities (never a clash, as Kuwata is partial to balance and discipline) is what generates Setchu’s hybrids of exquisite sophistication, highly artisanal in execution.Kuwata carries his multicultural background as a badge of honor, and rightly so, as it defines the unique nucleus of his aesthetic. Japanese by birth, the world is really his oyster, as there’s apparently not a country he hasn’t traveled to. He has the art of packing down to a T; being an accomplished fisherman who also happens to be trained in strict British tailoring at Savile Row’s H. Huntsman & Sons, looking well turned out even when catching freshwater fish in the most remote destinations has always been a priority. Fishing, but make it fashion.Fishing in style and packing in no time brought Kuwata to the conception of the origami blazer, a tailored jacket that comes already press-creased so you don’t have to care about ironing while wrestling to catch a supersized trout in Gabon. This season he added a version of a four-pocket safari jacket that morphs its shape via an inserted belt, and addressed the difficult task of washing your clothes when, say, you’re trekking in Mongolia. With the help of the ever resourceful Italian mills, he came up with a new fabric: a washable type of cashmere that can be thrown in the washing machine with no anxiety. If there isn’t one available within reach, a situation supposedly common in Mongolia, Kuwata said, “you can wash it in the nearby river.”The washable cashmere was made into a few malleable chic specimens, the most striking being a dress cut from a continuous piece of fabric, inspired by the makimono, a long drawing that’s usually hung on walls of Japanese ryokans.
The column-shaped dress is closed by only a few buttons at the ankles, can be worn open at the shoulders for a sexy look, or flipped, turning it into a boatneck tunic; when laid flat it can be rolled up “like a Fortuny Delphos dress without the pleats,” Kuwata said.
14 January 2024
Satoshi Kuwata, the founder of the label Setchu and winner of this year’s LVMH Prize, is a Japanese designer with charm and drive to spare. He doesn’t lack eccentricity either. His passion is fishing, and he usually does it dressed to the nines in a suit. “Why not?” he asked.His favorite fishing destination is Gabon, Africa. “Getting there is a day job,” he joked at a preview of his spring collection. “You change the flight three times, take a car drive for three hours, then a boat for four hours. You cannot take a big suitcase with you. But I like to look dapper like Gustav von Aschenbach, the lead character of Visconti’sDeath in Venicewho traveled with 20 trunks. No wheels.”Because tweed suits aren’t acclimatized to Gabon’s temperatures, he designed what he calls an origami tuxedo, a double-breasted blazer impeccably cut following the sartorial rules he learned working on Savile Row at H.Huntsman & Sons. The fastidious Kuwata had it made in a weightless, high-quality Italian fabric treated to keep permanent front creases; even if you’re in a remote region of Gabon, New Zealand, Mongolia, or Senegal (all fishing destinations he has traveled to) and an ironing board isn’t immediately at hand, the jacket will still look immaculate. Functional but swanky, it’s apparently the best fishing tuxedo ever made.Born in Kyoto, Kuwata has traveled extensively. Between trips to the four corners of the world, he has lived in London, Paris, and New York, and he’s now based in Milan, where he launched his first collection in February 2021. Setchu in Japanese means ‘compromise’ or ‘fusion of different cultures’. It’s a word coined in the 19th century, when Japan opened its borders to the West after being isolated for almost 200 years. “It’s like if the pandemic lasted not two years but 200 years,” said Kawata. “When the Japanese woke up, they panicked, but in the end they found a way to adjust to Western culture, integrating it into their own. Compromise is not a bad word — it’s a way of coexisting.”There are three codes Kuwata has established for Setchu the label. One: the elegant Japanese culture of minimalism and timeless garments. Two: the functionality that comes from his fishing obsession (“I don’t want to have style boundaries between city life and outdoor life”). Three: his unique Savile Row tailoring background. “But the reason I’m in Italy is because it’s the best country to make a beautiful garment,” he stated.
At the presentation of his spring collection, held at Fondazione Sozzani, genderless garments were laid flat on traditional tatamis, which made you appreciate the clever way Kuwata approaches pattern-making, cut, and construction. His garments mutate via inventive fastening, draping, and folding details. Zippers can transform a fine wool sweater into a protective cape; clean-cut panels can be assembled into a lean tunic, and then disassembled and combined into various shapes or lengths. They look like beautiful living origami. “The patterns are simple, like Vionnet,” he explained. “What I do goes back to what we can do with our hands and brain. My message is that the artisanal value embodied into each garment is extremely high. My work isn’t about AI.”You can buy a new Setchu dress that fuses into an old one, becoming a mutation of a previous incarnation. Kuwata doesn’t believe in the frantic rhythm of fashion shows, nor in designing a new collection every season. “My dresses are like a family of iPhones—One, Two, Three. I update them little by little.”
19 June 2023