Maison Mihara Yasuhiro (Q8063)
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Maison Mihara Yasuhiro is a fashion house from BOF.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Maison Mihara Yasuhiro |
Maison Mihara Yasuhiro is a fashion house from BOF. |
Statements
“This collection is about the idea of persona. When I look back on my life, the influences I had as a child were really strong, so I tried to create the collection with that sense of childlikeness,” Mihara Yasuhiro said backstage before his show. The designer’s own infant child has also begun to develop their own personality recently, which got Mihara thinking about the ways in which we build our own identities—the parts we show consciously and superficially, and of course, the parts we try to hide.“We’re at a time where we have to reconsider what we mean by personality. Even AI has a personality now, so I wanted to think about what makes us human and express the instability of the human condition,” he continued. Backs were missing from some of the jeans to expose bare skin, or extra legs sprung out from the front so that they weren’t worn so much as stuck onto the body. A gold sequined dress came with one arm unworn, while shirts and jackets had extra shirts sewn onto the rear or were so oversized that the models looked like children wearing adult clothing. The result was a sense of vulnerability hidden behind the cool-kid edginess that Mihara cultivates so well with his clothes.And then the party really got started. Halfway through the show, a middle-aged man in a shirt and tie (sat directly behind this surprised reviewer) whipped out a mic and started belting out his best rendition of “Sweet Caroline.” He turned out to be a very nice man from London called Glen, who had been planted in the audience by the Mihara team to perform. Next came Jason in the opposite row, who sang the Four Tops’s “Can’t Help My Self,” followed by Brian, who gave a crooning rendition of “Daydream Believer” by The Monkees as the models came out of the tinsel curtains and walked the finale. Staff in the rafters threw basketfuls of silver confetti over the scene, and some showgoers joined the singing. It was pure joy in fashion show form, and it temporarily transformed the Salle Wagram into a British boozer.The merrymaking meant that a chunk of the clothes that came down the runway had their limelight stolen—but they were certainly worthy of attention. There were MA-1 bombers with triple-layered zippers, super-cropped souvenir jackets, and two new models of the designer’s popular melted-sole sneakers.
The desire to go back to childhood came through in the smatterings of star and heart stickers on grungy sweatpants, jeans, and chore jackets; on the bags shaped like dinosaurs and teddy bears; and on sandals with rubber ducks for heels and handbags with bananas for handles. It was good fun mixed with some interesting statements about what it really means towearyour clothes.Between each karaoke song, there were pauses filled with foreboding music that changed the mood completely until the next tune started up. It felt like an inevitable kind of encroaching darkness, kept at bay with a song. What else is there to do but sing along?
21 June 2024
Mihara Yasuhiro has bittersweet memories of wearing his brother’s hand-me-downs. He liked the sense of possibility when he wore adult clothes, and he also recalls the first time he tagged along to a disco, when he was about 11-years-old.“When I entered I felt like I had stepped into this glittery, glossy, nocturnal world, and that really impressed me,” he said through an interpreter during a backstage interview. “Now that I am an adult, when I look at that same nocturnal world I feel like it’s really childish, so I wanted to put a sense of that into my creations.”The fall collection, entitled “Wobbler Part Four” continues the “Big Silhouette” series the designer introduced for spring 2024. It was steeped in nostalgia, and boosted by a squad of “Paris” cheerleaders who resurged variously in a revisited MA1 military blouson, a cape-like khaki and orange coat inspired by English jackets, or bombers deliberately blown up, processed and faux-aged to look like vintage. That is a subject close to the designer’s heart: his studio and home are filled with military pieces, tailoring and workwear picked up in Paris, Italy, and especially Koenji in Tokyo (the best for rare finds, he said). “I think I am the designer with the most vintage clothes, next to Nigel Cabourn,” he offered.Further along, a series of pieces in glossy faux-enameled leather, paired with chunky knits in seashell hues, made a strong statement for both genders. Real leather pieces for men and women came courtesy of a collaboration with the Japanese brand Isamu Katayama Backlash. Shiny, dark, tinsely statement pieces like coats or a one-sleeved stole brought the fun, leavening the nostalgia with another suggestion: maybe the antidote to these fast-changing times is that one should never really grow up. Maybe the best thing to do is just dress up and go out.
19 January 2024
Nostalgia has cunning ways of taking over one’s thoughts. Today, Mihara Yasuhiro employed his spring 2024 collection as a compass to guide him through a labyrinth he described backstage as a “lo-fi memory haze.”Yasuhiro was a young boy when the Berlin Wall came down, and he recalls the mood of the time through a mishmash of memories, many revolving around the music of the period, and others, of course, around the fashion. “The ’90s went by as if we were living too fast, and even now, memories of that time sink and float like ingredients in a soup,” the designer wrote in his show notes.His approach to evoking that time, he explained, involved making all his clothes this season look “vintage.” There were grungy sweaters ripped as if they had been well worn and well loved for years before they hit the runway, and the light summer cottons were treated through a process of repeated spraying and dyeing to make them look aged. The clothes had a patina that conjured age and the passing of time. Had it not been for Yasuhiro’s contemporary proportions and styling (with an emphasis on layering, tying and cinching), one could have been looking at faded photographs of a different era.The designer’s proposal for the season was grounded in what he called “the big silhouette.” Outerwear pieces ranging from knee-long hoodies to utility vests, parkas, and button-downs were supersized into engulfing, hulking silhouettes without, surprisingly, doing away with their lightness. Yasuhiro also cut slits on the sides of the pieces so they could be worn as capes with the sleeves hanging to the sides—a clever (and functional) way of having the pieces maintain their billowing proportions intact. The impetus for this idea came from Yasuhiro’s memories of wearing his brother’s clothes when he was young. They were always too big on him, he said, but he’d wear them anyway and find comfort in their cocooning ways. A run of plaid button-downs worn as coats and a set of distressed hoodies made the best bridge between the designer’s ’90s grunge inspiration and fashion today.Another Easter egg from Yasuhiro’s childhood came in the shape of triceratops and T-Rex handbags and cross bodies, a nod back to his obsession with dinosaurs as a child. There were also cassette tape wallets worn as lanyards and, to this reviewer’s delight, magazine cover clutches featuring back numbers of cult street-style magazinesSTREETandFRUiTS, which first went to print in 1985 and 1997, respectively.
These were playful and sweet but not saccharine, and they pulled the nostalgia away from melancholia.There have been several callbacks to boyishness on the runways this season, but Yasuhiro’s felt positively earnest. If there’s one thing that can make these projections of nostalgia enchanting, is when they come from one’s own memories, haze and all.
23 June 2023
What a fake Mihara Yasuhiro is. But at least he admits it. “Usually I make a reality feeling but this time there is a fake feeling,” he fessed up as he served green tea to guests at this typically entertaining show. Yasuhiro used his transition this season from his staple real leather to faux leather as his starting point. He observed that by applying weathering techniques to the new “faux” product he could achieve a passable forgery of the “real thing.” As the collection’s title Imitation Complex suggested, this sent him down a rabbit-hole to explore ideas of manufactured authenticity.Many of his boxfresh but apparently well worn-in looks had a “fatter,” oversized silhouette thanks to the padding used to enlarge the pieces. This was to provide insulation, he said, not only from the elements but the onrush of information in the contemporary age (this might have been why he chose to soundtrack the show with a talented, remorseless drummer). Suiting for men and women, sometimes built around skirts, came in velvet or attractive check wools and shared that expansively insulating silhouette. Bags, presumably in faux leather, were soft, squidgy, and stuffed. A double-layer of fake mens work shirts—both were padded again—in pale blue and Bengal stripes were too beautiful to fret about their veracity: Yasuhiro was going about his craft like an unusually gifted cosmetic surgeon with a specialization in filler.Frayed denim truckers, nylon bombers, and cotton parkas got the same treatment. Then came a more prosaic series of puffas which looked, especially with that apparently bootleg logo, like brilliantly produced AliExpress North Face knock-offs: Yasuhiro was entering Sports Banger territory. Before we closed with a final salvo of faux-distressed, faux-leather workwear pieces, oversized by more steroid padding, we saw two looks built around prints of a US dollar bill: money walks. This was an extension of the jewelry collaboration with artist Kota Okuda that allowed Yasuhiro customers to wear their money. Which was very honest indeed.
23 January 2023
When you swan in 20 minutes late for a show (because you were inhaling a sandwich across the road) you fully expect it to be ready to go. But no. Instead the scene in Maison Mihara Yasuhiro’s 25th anniversary show resembled a dysfunctional British airport, just with much better dressed passengers. They milled around the runway or slouched on their chairs, checking their phones. One guy in a hi-vis vest and sunglasses was brushing the trash-strewn floor with an almost insolent lack of application—he kept stopping to chat to people instead of getting on with the job at hand.Closer inspection revealed that this layabout was in fact Mihara himself. “I wanted it to be a friendly atmosphere,” he said through a translator of his first show in Paris for three years. “And I think we have been living in a feeling of confinement, so I wanted to release this atmosphere by expressing a lie, falsehood, or deception.”Yasuhiro’s clothes are indeed dishonest. You look at them one way, and take them at face value: Ok, that’s a pair of jeans. Then they pass you and you cast them a second glance: Oho, those are track pants. This wearable white lie, and many variations of it running through militaria and vintage ’50s inspired pieces for men and for women, was variously expressed over and over again on the runway. Highlights included deconstructed fringed rodeo leathers, the black jean with a vintage 35mm SLR imprinted on one thigh, a layered MA1 waistcoat in olive, and two-faced graftings of jersey casuals against buffalo check.The collection was entitled Superficial You—which might as well be a shorthand for clothing itself—and a t-shirt featuring a faded Campbell’s soup can hinted at the designer’s subversive intent. An extra untruth in this clothing was delivered by multiple pieces featuring trompe l’oeil effects that were almost as convincing as the designer-dressed-as-runway-sweeper installation that prefaced the show. Ironically, given the title, the crowd watched this intensely wrought radical remix of menswear with probably a five-out-10 level of raptness—until near the end the room was filled with bubbles. Out came the camera phones en masse. Superficial, us?
24 June 2022
Look at this great show: excellent clothes, al fresco in Asakusa, in front of a standing masked audience who are showing their appreciation by raising their devices and filming merrily away. And yet according to Mihara, this last detail is illustrative of something so vexatious that he ended our preview conversation by saying that if he was starting out now, he probably wouldn’t go into fashion design at all.Initially dedicated to shoes, this designer’s eponymous brand was launched in 1997. That 25 year anniversary, plus his 50th birthday upcoming in the summer, has put him in a creatively melancholic space. As his translator Yumi put it: “when he started out, getting information was much harder than it is now because there was no internet. So he had to form his own way of thinking and invent something for himself.”Mihara’s aesthetic evolution was strongly informed by the broader Tokyo passion at the time for Yankee or American Casual style, which was then very centered around finding the perfect pieces of vintage clothing. Much of this collection was made from vintage pieces from his own personal archive—a packed rail of which was the backdrop to our Zoom. It was shown in Asakusa because that was the site of Yasuhiro’s first office, Yumi said: “because “that’s where all the factories for shoemaking were. He’s thankful and has a connection with that area. At the moment he feels tired of this globalism and people using iPhones all the time—he wanted to focus on local family coming together and friends coming together.”Now I can totally see where Mihara is coming from: we pre-digital dinosaurs remember what it was like to incubate our interests without constant interactional froth, not to mention the thrill of discovering content in those bygone analog times. The way style tribes and trends once evolved, super-geographically-specifically until they were lovingly reported by titles like The Face and i-D, has moved on.But the time is now and that’s how it is. And Mihara’s specific brand of vagabond surrealism deserves device-wielding content creators to embrace his work as content, because it’s really great. Just look at those jackets fashioned with six brands of fanny pack, for instance, or that masterful multi-sleeve liner jacket in Look 50 (with the designer turned traffic cop hamming it up in the background). Even if you weren’t there in IRL, you’d want to be—cheer up, Mihara!
21 January 2022
The Mihara Yasuhiro team clearly had a blast shooting this collection in a terminal of the still-closed but freshly-refreshed Haneda airport, reprising the central character from his last movie—this time cast as a befuddled pilot—and closing the sequence with a fashion-mosh soundtracked by the band Lite.More arduously—we’re counting the seconds ’til these previews are brought to you no longer by Zoom but once again #Uberstyle—yet nonetheless interestingly, Yasuhiro explained over the echoey stream what had drawn him so literally to this new departures. As his translator translated: “he doesn’t like travelling much—or at least before, he didn't really like travelling much. But because we can’t right now, he’s kind of missing it. And next time, like in January, hereallywants to go back to Paris.” Sing it!Yasuhiro’s moodboard revealed lots of irreverent situationist art, Catellan-heavy, and hinted at the deep dive into vintage research that always informs his archetype-teasing work. Or as he was translated: “What he’s trying to aim for is something that’s not perfect. There’s kind of an ugliness there. So maybe it’s not perfect, but the imperfectness of it makes it more beautiful. That’s what he’s saying. That’s what he’s really into.”This strategy of exposing and teasing flaws in the apparently ordinary to open a window to the extraordinary was fast tracked from check-in through to passport control. Forward-shucked shoulders on a patchwork denim jacket, a gorgeously worn M65 jacket with a plastic-surgeon’s practice session misplaced pocket flap, and “hidden beauty” single piece de-seamed jean skirts were a few highlights that are sure to take off once they’re in stores. It will be great to see Yasuhiro back in Paris again.
25 June 2021
A man walked into a bar at the beginning of this collection’s presentation video. That man was one of the designer’s old friends (“they were at university together,” explained the translator), while that venue was a 37-year old Tokyo gay bar named KIDS. Yasuhiro said in an email: “It was a very important place for me since I was young. The bar is closed due to COVID-19, so it has become a dream to drink there. I wanted you to know this!”Dreaming of past times in places currently unreachable is one of the present moment’s most beguiling pursuits—a great way to kill time that’s way more psychologically enriching than doomscrolling. That highly personal intro informed a philosophically ambitious collection in which Yasuhiro attempted to apply processes that indicated experience and memory—the passage of time—to his garments. As his translator put it: “He gets inspiration from vintage clothing very much, the oldness of it, the time-essence of it…. When he designs something, he wants it to look as if he’s putting some time essence to the clothing.”This reminded me of a similarly philosophical shoemaker I once read about who, once his shoes were complete, would bury them for several years before offering them for sale. Yasuhiro’s application of “time-essence” by comparison was completed rapidly; he cited staining, tearing, and sunburning as amongst his techniques for accelerating the apparent aging of the clothes. Buffalo check shirts appeared to have been freshly fashioned from several worn out remains, jeans and combat fatigues were melded into one, and a check suit was oversized to make the wearer appear dramatically slimmed down since he’d been first measured for it. This collection interestingly interrogated fashion’s sustainably problematic addiction to the ‘new’ and the ‘young’ by presenting the aesthetic and philosophical appeal of the apparently worn and cosmetically old. Plus it was melancholy, romantic, and attractively wild—something to think about wearing in the future when the bars have opened and the time is freer.
22 January 2021
We’re all Muppets. Or if not, then most definitely puppets. Mihara Yasuhiro’s excellent video presentation allowed the first shaft of comedy to lighten fashion for months (if not longer). Check it out, and see if you recognize anyone. Who’s that wool-haired, clipboard-wielding PR? Who’s that stick-armed Phil Oh and co. catnip influencer? Who’s that feverishly writing editrix maven? Takaumi Furuhashi’s puppets and direction are hilarious and also reflect Mihara Yasuhiro’s irreverently philosophical soul.Then we got to the collection, something that reflected the (relative) serenity of Japan’s Covid-19 experience—it was produced and filmed in full, a portfolio of excellent, rich, potently articulated clothes. The flavor was consistent with Yasuhiro’s deep-diving Yankii-mixologist bent, packed with attractive attacks on symmetry achieved via the serial splicing and dicing of recognizable garments. According to the notes a dappled-color finish, especially handsome on an M-65 field jacket (that probably included elements of several other garments too), was achieved by a new spray application technique. Unlike the Instagramming puppets, the models were impossible to identify (at least until you got to the Marvel-movie extensive credits) thanks to the pixels that masked their faces. Via email Yashuhiro said: “I wanted people to be free to imagine why I did it. I think that when people imagine their own reasons in their own philosophies, their views change.”Yashuhiro added: “When humans solve problems, new problems arise. Whatisthe problem?... The reason I like fashion is that the more I pursue it, the more I ask the question ‘What is fashion?’ There is no answer, because there is no problem at all.”
11 July 2020
At the Palais de Tokyo, designer Mihara Yasuhiro took advantage of cavernous volumes to stage a bit of meta-theater. A couple dozen art students seated at easels faced the audience, sketching faces as models walked by. That was clever. However, the ear-shattering soundtrack of a music rehearsal—theWilliam Tell Overture, aka theLone Rangertheme, among other classics—was torture. Editors flinched. Stylists squirmed. People dashed. No sentient being should have to listen to that, not even if their own kids were on the horns. And certainly not in the name of fashion.It’s a shame, because it detracted from some interesting clothes. Yasuhiro continued on his singular path, this time offering up two-fers, merging trenches or shirts with complementary mates so that that the looks had one kind of front and a contrasting back. That way, his base can look different coming and going. “I wanted to give the back more volume this season,” he said through a translator. “I wanted to keep it realistic.” All things being relative, of course.Yasuhiro grew up admiring American vintage—jeans, plaid shirts, military gear—and for Fall he gave those staples his own touch, approaching them, he said, like sculptures that reflect the flow of time. Apparently “normal” (his words) pieces slyly incorporated the kind of avant-garde flourishes his customers love, like witty patches, double collars, and destroyed details with trailing threads. “What I want to do is create daily wear, rather than streetwear,” the designer said. “These kinds of details are time-related: you bring together things that are clean with something distressed.”Everything passes eventually. Time changes things. By turns, things can be absurd or sublime. Yasuhiro marches to his own music. That's cool, so long as it doesn't cause headaches.
18 January 2020