Takahiromiyashita The Soloist (Q8790)
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Japanese fashion brand
- TAKAHIROMIYASHITATheSoloist.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Takahiromiyashita The Soloist |
Japanese fashion brand |
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Statements
“Plainsong” was the name Takahiro Miyashita gave this spring collection for The Soloist, which he intended as a smartened-up rebellion against the slobishness of fashion today. “These days, it seems that clothes are worn carelessly by many people,” he wrote in the collection notes. To make his point, he purposefully avoided using any socks or jewelry in the lookbook images, forwent anything oversized, and made sure each shirt and jacket was buttoned or zipped up to the top.The collection marked the first time the designer had ever made short sleeved shirts (Tokyo’s suffocatingly hot summer can no longer be endured in long sleeves). Aloha shirts were decorated with winding scores of sheet music, as well as a psychobilly-esque leopard print. The meat and potatoes of the collection, however, was an expansion of Miyashita’s enduring anglophilia; it unfolded in a palette of crimson and black, and partly served as an homage to the late British stylist Judy Blame.“Not many people may know, but Judy and I were good friends…he was like an older brother to me,” Miyashita wrote. The two of them would sometimes drink together at Blame’s home in London, and Miyashita would always marvel at Blame’s sense of style. And so the Japanese designer distilled his friend’s punkishly polished essence through his own unique filter.Blame’s signature smattering of buttons appeared across the sides and sleeves of blazers and Harrington jackets, as well as the tops of Blame-ish berets. “It might be said that Judy possessed me, or perhaps I wanted to embody him,” Miyashita added. Elsewhere, gold military shank buttons cast with original Soloist insignia jangled gently on coats and blazers (some had as many as 300), while others were festooned with ribbons or covered with embroidered heraldic badges. It was part punk, part marching band; buttoned-up yet bad-boyish, and a fitting tribute.Miyashita’s tailoring, fabric choice, and silhouettes are always meticulous, and the rigor of the collection and styling allowed his talents to shine. Sensitivity to the finest detail; that’s what makes The Soloist special. Under the collar of the tailored coats, the designer took the time to add a strip of leather to reinforce them, along with an accompanying strip of plush pinkish velvet on the inside. It’s no doubt something that Blame himself would have appreciated.
9 August 2024
Takahiro Miyashita’s fall collection was what the designer called “a cacophony of eternal pieces,” made up of a selection of reimagined items taken from the designer’s own wardrobe. How intimate! And how very Miyashita.He called it Days of our Youth, a look back on his favorite eras—punk, as usual, shone through—and it served as a retrospective journey through the clothing that has taken the elusive designer from his teenage years to now.Black and white photographs featuring carefree-looking adolescents from Joseph Szabo’s 2003 book TEENAGE, were stitched as patches across double-breasted overcoats, sleeveless leathers, and textured knits, mostly in black except for a few houndstooth and Glen plaid pieces and some transparent vinyl jackets.The tunic-like dresses gave some of that familiar priest-like macabre-ness that Miyashita excels at making stylish, and he’d also brought back the skeleton bone details from his previous collection as ribcages fastidiously stitched across bombers and coats – a motif he’s loved since childhood. The fabrics, including tactile tweeds in various weights, were wonderfully soft to touch. Miyashita himself is never at his showroom previews to put everything into context, but you forgive him for it because you can feel him in the clothes.The best detail was that the tunics, with fastenings at the back, had clever straps so that you could do them up yourself even if you had no one around to help you. Clothes for a true soloist in every sense.
14 March 2024
Takahiro Miyashita’s collection for spring was split neatly into three parts: Britishness, bones, andboro(the Japanese word for tattered clothes). Ever the enigma, Miyashita himself didn’t make an appearance at his showroom in Tokyo, but a number of his tight-knit team (some of whom have been with him since the Number (N)ine days) were on hand to give context.Fortunately, there were plenty of details to delight in. First, that unmissable Union Jack print—something the Anglophile designer has riffed on before—turned out to have been achieved by a rather strange new design method. Miyashita had spent weeks folding bits of construction paper into miniature garments so he could work out where the flag would fall on each jacket or pair of jeans. Tedious work, but a mountain of doll-size origami clothes later, he’d perfected it. Also new was a wider armhole that was achieved by bringing the underarm gusset down a few inches, lending the blazers and photographer vests a rounded silhouette that felt fresh.The bones on the skeleton trousers and rib cage jackets added some gothic grunge to the mix, but best of all was the boro, which came through in artful rips in black trench coats and tailoring that felt gloriously light to wear. In some cases, the fraying threads were colored burgundy so they appeared almost like bloody wounds in the fabric. That might sound macabre, but in Miyashita’s practiced hands, even would-be gimmicks become deliciously romantic.Along with the faded monochrome Union Jack, the addition of the black crown hats made you wonder whether Miyashita had been pondering a certain monarch’s passing last year. Funereal or not, it topped off a royal display of the delicate darkness and mystery that this fashion punk has made his realm. God save the Soloist.
26 September 2023
When words fail, say it with clothes. Takahiro Miyashita’s fall collection was a love letter of sorts to a “close female friend…a friend and a sister at the same time.” The notes kept the identity of the woman a secret and the nature of the relationship vague, but said that she was someone whose opinion Miyashita holds in high esteem. Whatever the case, Miyashita is a designer who feels things on a different plane than the rest, and when the clothes came out, it was clear that there was some deep and unspeakable emotion that had been poured into them. You wondered if that mysterious woman was one of the faces in the crowd.Presented in the corridors of Tokyo National Museum’s Hyokeikan (a place originally built to host the wedding of the Taisho Crown Prince), it was Miyashita’s first runway show in a year and a half, and it felt like he’d been saving up for it. A real sense of romance came through in the textures— fluffy vests or layered velvet suit jackets in outfits that mostly ended above the knee, except for hard shoes that were often printed withRAY GUN, a reference to the graphic designer David Carson’s experimental magazine of the same name that Miyashita had admired as a teenager. When hemlines did extend further down the leg, it was in wide leather culottes, or gently restrictive maxi skirts that seemed to hint at holding something back.Gentle piano music that had been composed by Miyashita’s longtime collaborator Akira Kosemura drifted throughout the halls (go on, play some of his music as you look through the pictures), and the models paced slowly so that each delicate detail sang: the light catching on the cream velvet of a rumpled sleeve, or the tiniest whisper of an eyelet trim on purple and burgundy satin that fell down to the top of the thigh. There was an extraordinary tenderness to it, the kind of show you felt privileged to have been in the room to witness.Miyashita wasn’t doing interviews, but he answered some brief questions over email after the show. The unnamed woman, it turned out, had not been in Tokyo to see the runway show, but she had seen the collection. “Tears to my eyes,” she had said.
18 March 2023
On December 12, 1992, the British music weeklyMelody Makerasked Kurt Cobain why he and his bandmates wore dresses in the video for “In Bloom.” At the end of a brief but brilliant interview, Cobain replied: “Cross-dressing is cool. I’m sorry I can’t come up with any better reasons for why we wore dresses for our video shoot, it’s just that I wear them all the time—round the house, wherever.”Cobain maintained that he wore dresses for comfort (the same interview reveals his intimate problem with Levi’s) rather than to be subversive or progressive or political or whatever. Yet the “In Bloom” video’s contrast between Nirvana attired in striped blazers with mop-top haircuts, à la early Beatles, and the band’s thrashing in womens wear was surely no casual adjacency: All true punk spirits rattle the cage of categorization through provocation while appearing to be nonchalant about it.Which is a two-paragraph preamble to the first 10 looks of this Soloist collection, all renderings of different Cobain looks—from gigs, videos, magazine shoots forRolling StoneandMademoiselle—hand-painted on medical gowns. These were part of a collection that Takahiro Miyashita indicated in his notes was inspired by a creative instinct to jolt forward and refrain from repetition. The results included skirts resembling pants printed with text that Google Translate suggested might be Oromo, hoodie dresses with more legible brand markings, and de-then-reconstructed tailoring structured and decorated with languidly curving zippers. Gender norms were the cage being rattled, nonchalantly, and the Soloist spirit burned bright and clear.
25 October 2022
Sacai and Yohji Yamamoto made happy returns to Paris this season. Sadly, though, Takahiro Miyashita is amongst the majority of pre-pandemic presenting Japanese designers—a group that also includes Anrealage, the Commes crew, Miyake, and Kolor—who have yet to be able revive the inimitable intimacy of showing their clothes to a live audience in fashion’s capital. “Naturally, I’m eager to go back there as soon as possible,” said Miyashita in the now standard pre-written Q&A: “Paris has been and will always hold a special place for me, like blues musicians aspiring to make music in Memphis or Nashville.”Paris is indeed fashion design’s cradle, but in his absence from it, this most musically-led of designers has continued to riff with passion and precision. This season’s collection was entitled The Era and inspired by “Fifth Beatle”Billy Preston’s improvisational impact on music. Elusive as ever, Miyashita presented a film in which four models wearing balaclavas, cocoon-shaped coats, and skinny jeans were only ever seen from behind (or sometimes fleetingly in on-bicycle profile). The coats, including a pink-to-purple duffle, a shearling, and an elongated black bomber, mostly featured a zipper that ran from the left shoulder down to the right hip. In his notes Miyashita said this was to represent “punctuation” alongside “function.” Flipped “right” side forward in the lookbook you could see these zippers extended forward into the sternum, and similarly punctuated the left leg of some trousers.The lookbook also suggested that Miyashita was working to rearrange menswear standards via his Preston-inspired improv approach. Without that intimacy of proximity it is impossible to report the more subtle modulations, but in general the designer was imposing a consistent silhouette across various greatest hits in generic menswear; the peacoat, the trench, the aviator, the cardigan, the duffle, and a cool dark furry-looking piece you could see Ringo or George rocking with aplomb. “I find certain redundancy meaningful in garments,” said Miyashita, and you could argue, in agreement with this statement, that his freestyle riffs were ultimately superfluous. And yet they also allowed you to see highly familiar garments in a funkily fresh light, which was probably the point. This was another strong studio session from The Soloist—how cool it will be to see him play with clothes live again.
8 March 2022
There has been so much rhetoric about resets in fashion recently that it sometimes feels like we’re stuck in some piece of obsolescence-threatened, endlessly glitching hardware, with designers, retailers, and editors alike repeatedly switching off and on again, praying for the lights to come on. With this typically left-field collection—way more Linux than Windows or Mac—Takahiro Miyashita devolved our reset mania from digital to analogue and then embraced the positives of being on the way to something that feels more functioning than previously.This show at Tokyo Fashion Week was, he said in a Q&A, a half-way between the previous digital exile and a hoped-for return to Paris, “my spiritual home.” The name of the collection was Pause = Play, which he rationalized thus: “I have never looked back on my own past or self-reflected but this season I started to develop the collection by thinking about who I am as a person. I pressed pause for a moment in order to press play again. On the day of the runway show, I will press play to complete the collection.” Past influences that played into this present Soloist chapter included a representative from the Blue Man Group (a formative influence on the designer) and a graphic based on a Joseph Szabo photograph Miyashita has long admired, which was then “shredded” as if part of a recorded film you’d pressed pause on using a clapped-out VHS machine.The show also revealed a fractious relationship with bags, a category that continues to adrenalize the business. The designer said: “I saw the saturation of bags on runways and wanted to think about models posing without bags and question the necessity of carrying bags.” Near sacrilegiously he incorporated his portage into bag-like but not bag-identifying structures, sort of beyond-pockets, within the garments. To add a distinctly lockdown-fatigued twist, he then shrouded his models in, well, bags. “I wanted models who hover between the real and unreal,” he added.Once you paused pausing at these details to play through the collection head-to-toe, the narrative became dominated by ironically intricate sci-fi vests, tailoring shrouded in veils of what looked like talcum-scattered transparent rubber, and the rigorous Rorschach beauty of those shredded Szabo graphics. And then, stop.
21 September 2021
From his highly cultivated purgatory between restraint and release, Takahiro Miyashita let multiple influences contaminate his creative petri dish this season. There was the classic Beatles movieHelp!, of which Miyashita said in his collection notes: “I think they were freely doing everything they wished for, but rarely had time for [themselves], thus [they] could have been quite suppressed too.” This led him to build a collection containing a hidden musical score, via top-half jackets and shirts featuring two straps, and bottom-half pants and shorts featuring three: These five straps, he said, combined to symbolize a musical stave upon which his garments signified the notes.Further inflections Included James Ellroy’s monumentalThe Black Dahlia, David Fincher’sFight Cluband the movies of John Cassavetes, all of which were gently referenced in the film that represented Miyashita’s performance of his wearable score. Zippers and safety pins provided a metallic percussion that he said was in part inspired by Judy Blame, while the exclusively monochrome arrangement reflected his consideration of asceticism-in-color as exemplified by OG Ann Demeulemeester. Fresh instrumental input came in a Miyashita invented font that hybridized gothic lettering and Morse code dashes and dots.The resulting melody blended the piratical and the punkish, playing britches against bikers and Breton stripe below a recurring beret high note. All of Miyashita’s imagined collaborations resulted in an any-gender collection that was nonetheless distinctly his—this is the Soloist, after all—and he underlined his inclination to swim against the tide in his notes, saying, regarding sustainability: “I understand the importance of the topic but at the same time I am concerned that it will quite literally stop garments to further evolve. I don’t think it is right to apply brakes on the evolution of garments and I have an urgency to keep exploring what could be new…I understand the importance of sustainability thus feel alarmed to see it becoming merely a trend.” Like many others, Miyashita suspects that we are in a fault-line moment—that’s why he called this collection “Re”—and this collection was a heartfelt pitch proposing one possible future direction. After all those references there was still time for one more, so he turned to T.S. Eliot for a poetic coda: “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning / The end is where we start from.”
9 March 2021
Takahiro Miyashita is nearly 10,000 kilometers away from his traditional platform at Paris Fashion Week. Yet ironically enough from his home in Japan the designer delivered more commentary with this digital presentation than he ever has in person at a physical show. That was thanks to a Q&A with editor Junsuke Yamasaki that dropped into the inbox along with the usual WeTransfers.Of the film of the collection that begins with close-ups of a scalpel slicing sections of text—consistent with Miyashita’s choppily assertive use of graphics—and also features some shots of the pieces being worn in what looks like a dystopian Amazon fulfillment center, the designer observed: “I asked my old friend to do the music, but I also started to have a feeling for taking a part in the music creation myself and actually tried some guitar and humming. My final thought is that a clothes maker could actually dabble in creating a film without having to call on a grand production team, and finish a piece.”Yamasaki also asked, reasonably, if Miyashita had, as he had heard, included a womenswear line with this collection, to which the designer answered: “That’s because there was a woman appearing in the scene. But as I have mentioned since the beginning, I’m not interested in sex or gender difference. There’s no particular intention in doing a women’s line and I imagined quite a manlike woman in any case.”That theme was central to a collection in which the designer was working to reject categorizations of size, gender, age—everything, really—by presenting a suite of universally wearable garments fashioned in his no-sew style. As a manifesto, that sounds very uplifting, but Miyashita sees the world through a dark prism. The central armless jacket shape was based around the design of a suit carrier, and by characterizing his male and female characters as “John Doe” and “Jane Doe,” he presented the viewer with a clothing-as-body-bag conclusion. And yet via his graphics, which included “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for” (Ernest Hemingway,For Whom The Bell Tolls) and “Long is the way, and hard, that leads out of hell that leads up to light” (John Milton,Paradise Lost,by way ofSe7en), he also hinted at hope inside the misanthrope.
30 September 2020
Takahiro Miyashita’s English is apparently not the best (I suspect his ignorance is cleverly feigned). This does not matter because his shows communicate beautifully. Tonight’s was an extended sigh of masculine melancholy, both patently personal to the designer and universal enough that every man of a certain vintage and predisposition could shiver along with the pathos of kinship.These were red pill clothes designed to rattle the bars of identity, ably abetted by a soundtrack that ran from Jackson C. Frank’s “My Name is Carnival” to Sinatra’s version of “Send In The Clowns.” The clown eye makeup, recent use of Frank’s song inJoker, and garments printed with quotations attributed to Charlie Chaplin (including “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot,” and “I always like walking in the rain, so no one can see me crying”) were strong hints Miyashita was exploring masculine facades and the voids beneath them. This was a theme wonderfully encapsulated by the jacket-less reveres and coatless collars in a panoply of different vintage shapes and traditional fabrics that ran through the whole collection: fronts without backs, surfaces without depths, empty vessels.The reason why the collection was so sparse in the pants department—shorts ruled this runway—might have been as basic as vulnerability. Many of the garments featured strapping, vaguely threatening and institutional, that hinted at mental limits tested, bent, and constrained. Quite what the models who carried single blooms or small bouquets of jet black roses were mourning remained unsaid. Another brooding punctuation mark was the opaquely painted clock that read to eleven past eleven printed on some of the coats and shorts near the end and on the outside back of the upper of every riding boot worn down the Soloist runway.The strain placed upon male mental health by patriarchally embedded paradigms of maleness is a subject receiving increasing attention both beyond fashion and within it: Just yesterday Zegna and Gucci were engaged in an exchange about masculinity, toxic and not, on Instagram that would have been unimaginable until recently. No single entity can own male melancholy and existential angst—it is the unfortunate possession of too many for that—but the Soloist’s exploration of it is uniquely expressed. This collection was a poetically recounted course of unresolved therapy as painfully “authentic” as a runway show can be.
18 January 2020
So what was going on with the black felt fireman hats, old-school police hats, and jockey caps? Why did so many models wear waistcoats that looked like they’d been forcibly wrenched to the left of the body in a bar fight? And the kangaroo pocket pleat-bib shirt smocks? What was with Mickey Mouse? Tom Ford says long johns are an outerwear option now—when did you get that memo?“This is all just my style,” said Takahiro Miyashita, his expression obliquely refracted through his John Lennon glasses after this interesting show. The collection seemed to be a kind of imaginative boyhood view of tropes of uniform—the clothes that authority figures wear—all mussed up by a purposely blurred focus. There was a heavily gestalt feeling at play, yet the parts that made up the sum were in fact the meat and potatoes of this richly blended stew of auto-referential menswear.This was a collection based upon the aspirations of manhood we aspire to when immature, eroded by the knowledge gained through maturity. It was about lost love—love squandered—and idiocy. Yes, it was also about a collaboration with Converse that introduced a new pimp-soled postmodern expression of Chuck. The collection was called Duet, but it was really a series of duets between Miyashita and his references. Between them they created a handsome, soaring chorus in which the disappointment inherent in aspiring to fit into the uniform of masculine codes, and then falling short of their impossible standards, hung long and slow in the air. Miyashita called this “a love song for fashion” and it was real love, true love, tough love. With externally worn underwear—baring your soul, Soloist style.
18 June 2019
At last! Someart. This Soloist collection won’t be for everyone—although you will see its many-splendored, multi-zippered expressions of exposure dribble down into lesser technical lines—plus, objectively, it was at times ridiculous. But that’s fashion. The upside was that tonight, in this first Paris show with his brand under this nom de guerre, Takahiro Miyashita achieved fleeting wearable stanzas of poetry in menswear: No mean feat.That’s not just because these clothes were etched in sentences. I spent a fair part of this show noting the verses on Miyashita’s clothes, attached in patched sections, on the assumption they would be a trackback-able reference that would help unlock the message of the collection—hey, a normal designer would hang his or her collection on that. Frustratingly, however, they were not minor Ezra Pound or major Stephen Spender, or anything else recognized on Google—they were just sparse pieces of rather sad, wan poetry.Around them, presented on the wooden cobbles of the Bastille Design Center, were looks that were simultaneously tough and tender. The general drift was that above the waist it was all postapocalyptic wear, sometimes rubberized, sometimes knit, in softly puckered protective layers split by revealing scars of unzippered exposure. Satisfyingly, considering this was a seasonal theme stumbled upon, there were jankets 3.0—see Emporio and Ganryu previously. Below all the swathing were exposed legs (provocative and tender at once) above big faux-surplus boots. This was a man dressed up to repel a danger that he was himself the source of: beautiful and true, and a Catch 22. Man trouble.
15 January 2019
Takahiro Miyashita is a quixotic soul. Amid this loving, highly tooled return to one of his great founts of source material—Seattle grunge—were some fantastically intricate and layered garments. These included a series of jackets and topcoats whose hoods extended to reveal prints of photographs taken by grunge-scene chronicler Charles Peterson and which were lined with prints of snipped song lyrics handwritten by Oscar, the young son of a former colleague with whom Miyashita has worked on a collection previously. A whole range of pieces featured Peterson’s fantastic prints and included shirts with reversible front flaps that could be worn three ways. There were some excellent Texas-produced cowboy boots with welted soles, and reversible nylon jackets and pants that on one side featured a glinting starscape and on the other were far plainer—wearable dichotomies between youth and experience. Surprisingly outspoken for this whisper-discreet designer was a huge terry poncho–meets–picnic blanket with an enormous font label print. Absolutely beautiful and fresh feeling were the few long bomber jackets made of vintage American quilts that Miyashita had sourced from antique vendors.For a designer who has returned often to Americana, this felt like an especially deep and vital incorporation of his obsession’s fabric into his work. It’s a pity he was not at the showroom to deepen our understanding still further, but this was a classic collection full of grunge references that Soloist aficionados will delight in.
26 June 2018
According to Jun Takahashi of Undercover, he and Takahiro Miyashita of The Soloist worked on this shared show pretty much in isolation. Yes, they agreed on a symmetrically reflective theme—order/disorder against disorder/order—beforehand. And, yes, they consulted on the mutual finale that saw a line of models in black synthetic jeans and crop-top harnesses emerge from Miyashita’s backstage, and an opposing line of models in white floor-length pleated skirts emerge from Takahashi’s. These were the overlaps: the folds in the show structure that contained them both at this remarkable Pitti presentation. But beyond them they had no idea what each other was planning in their respective studios: “[Jun] only saw [Takahiro’s] collection two days ago!” said Chieri Hazu, Takahashi’s translator and right-hand woman.To review them, then, demands the collections be treated as they were created: in isolation, just as they are in the Paris showroom of Michèle Montagne, where these designers normally show their menswear. Alongside each other, but apart.Takahashi’s last women’s show played with the idea of twins and culminated in a bloodcurdling finale re-creation ofThe Shining’s Grady sisters. Here, he seized upon another unsettling Stanley Kubrick movie,2001: A Space Odyssey, yet at first the reference was repressed. To Joy Division’s “Atmosphere,” a model emerged in fine-knit gray: a cap, a sweater, and a pleated skirt. Then there was a navy version over a white shirt, and then two check iterations with an inbuilt, perhaps metallic-mix, stiffness, and then a final skirt-y look in beige, possibly velvet, possibly terry, that betrayed the first Kubrick reference: a shoulder-slung bag on which was writtenCaution: Contains Explosive Bolts,a sample from the writing on the escape hatches of the Apollo. For fans of the film, the references continued from there, woven first among looks that included heavily flocked fleece suiting and tracksuits, backwoodsman-in-summer forestry ensembles, HAL 9000 LED-eye fanny packs, and a series of raincoats emblazoned with slowly dawning warnings of digital chaos to come.Warning. Human Error. Computer Malfunction. Then a swerve to printed pieces showing the moon obelisk and2001’s hapless crew.
The final piece was a tattered-hem lilac gown and loose pajama suit with embroideries of the character Poole adrift in space, while the finale itself featured a line of five “astronauts” in primary-color quilted jackets with backlit face masks and zippered jersey pants.
11 January 2018
For this collection, entitled “Femme Fatale Fellow,” Takahiro Miyashita imagined himself the total wardrobe that he thinks the women of his dreams would like to see him wearing. It was sort of like his Tinder image in the form of clothing, a pheromone-driving phishing expedition aimed at snagging the eye of some 100 percent compatible candidate to become Mrs. Miyashita.So what can we work out about this elusive femme from looking at the collection? Certainly that she must love Nirvana. “We will always love you Kurt,” was etched onto the back of several pieces, and the clothes in which Kurt Cobain was photographed—his striped sweaters, a green cowboy print shirt, a tiger print sweater, a cardigan of fractured argyle diamonds—were translated, all black, into several others.There was “Hurt” as well as Kurt: The music to Johnny Cash’s epically sad remake of Nine Inch Nails’s power ballad of regret was embroidered on the sleeves of carefully recalibrated mother-of-pearl buttoned Western jackets and shirts available in several cuts, plus pullover faux-jackets (unbuttonable to make ruining their line impossible) and translations of these pieces into rather fabulous nylon technical wear. The music also played down the legs of slim-cut, or pleated and drawstringed loose-cut pants, all black, and an overall or two.This was, then, a beautiful but mournful collection: artistically deathly. To add to the flavor of mortality there were two Marlboro logo sweaters, one in gold Lurex, one in red wool: The menthol had not been delivered in time, but nobody likes menthol. And Miyashita had even designed a ring upon which was affixed a tiny trigger and functioning rotating chamber.So if you are a Femme who likes the sound of this Fatale-flavored collection and WLTM the Fellow who brought it to life, then head directly to The Soloist. You just might make a great duo.
25 June 2017
Takahiro Miyashita—the man behind Takahiromiyashita The Soloist, and former Number (N)ine designer—was in the mood for variety this season. He titled his collection “Alternative Tentacles,” to convey the every-which-way direction, and subsequent pull, of those squiggly arms. What he arrived at was something of a militaristic Western nexus—partWestworld, part Tokyo dandy, part elegant New Age aesthete. And the impression it left was one of thoroughness and sophistication—Miyashita marches to the snappy beat of his own drum (or, drums—the man is a music obsessive), but he sure knows how to edit.There was an emphasis on detailing. Leather trims, for instance, were left with buttonholes as if to imply they might later be attached to another outer layer. Cashmere and wool were interestingly combined to create a ripstop blend, which was then cut into a rabbit-fur-lined waistcoat. And a pair of subtly opalescent oatmeal gabardine trousers were, for lack of a better word, just plain sick.There were further accents in more novel territories: a ring with the letters N and Y overlaid, but rendered in the shape of bones. A T-shirt that readI don’t want to be an ADULT today. I don’t even want to be HUMAN. Today, I’m a CATfelt like it could otherwise be seen on an Inauguration Day Facebook status update—and thus, right on the money. In summation: a quality, grabby blend from this oh-so-singular Soloist.
21 January 2017
Takahiro Miyashita’swell-documented musical obsessions could only slant one direction for Spring 2017: David Bowie. The spirit of reinvention inherent in Bowie’s multiple stage personas was the underlying theme in this, the strongest collection the former Number (N)ine designer has put out under his Soloist imprint. In fact, scratch that: This season, the line was semi-officially rechristened Takahiromiyashita “The Skoloct.” No idea what that is? Me neither, until a few hours ago.The Skoloct is a fictional creature invented by Tsuyoshi Nakano, a Tokyo-based artist friend of Miyashita: The two collaborated on the collection, which prominently featured the character, a mysterious life-form from Harajuku that sort of looks like a cross between Bugs Bunny and Jake the Dog from the Adventure Time animated series. He’s not quite so anonymous to fans of Pharrell Williams and Nigo’s cult label Billionaire Boys Club, who collaborated with the Skoloct for a 2014 range.But what does this bunny have to do with Bowie? The notion of transformation, apparently: A series of arresting, recycled bandana masks allowed wearers to “transform” into the Skoloct, while a signature graffiti-style tag became a print, a jacquard, or simple defacement over the brand’s logo. Those masks will be sold, but will likely become collector’s items. They’re more geared to editorial, and deserve plenty. The rest of the collection riffed around two themes: mourning for Bowie, in a series of all-black garments based on Japanese silhouettes and tech reinterpretations of traditional Zen textiles; and evolution into Ziggy Stardust. Sounds like an extreme proposition, but actually both sides were eminently wearable, fine clothes without gimmicks but embedded with enough design to excite. It got silly, sometimes. Which was fun. Miyashita offered a one-arm, one-leg Ziggy jumpsuit in print-heavy spandex, alongside other glammed-up gear-like crocodile-imprint metallic leather trousers, and jewel-colored python boots with a price tag peaking somewhere around $5,000.Speaking of shoes, the other big news was the brand reissuing footwear by John Moore, an ’80s design legend and one founder of the “House and Beauty and Culture”, alongside Christopher Nemeth. Miyashita managed to wrangle a deal to team up and make white rubber versions of his Toe Patch combat boots. They didn’t fit into the Bowie boxes, but they looked great all the same.
26 June 2016
Takahiro Miyashita parted ways from his former label, Number (N)ine, in 2009: The Soloist is his follow-up project. The obsessions, however, remain the same—music and musicians. For Fall, there were styles named after John Lennon, George Harrison, Jimi Hendrix, and Kurt Cobain; the latter, an overriding obsession manifest most obviously in a series of holey knitwear. Isn’t it always?Miyashita cited the theme of this collection as youth—but not youthful. It was inspired by the state of mind, rather than the actuality. Age is just a number—here, the number was 6, the age of the child of a member of the design team whose drawings were the source of inspiration for many of the clothes. A violin scribble was knitted into a sweater, the image dissected to inspire F-hole-shaped pocket trims and embroideries—the latter exaggerated to resembled an “S” (for Soloist, see). Straps about the necks of jackets were inspired by the instrument’s chin rest; lapels were shaped a bit like a treble clef.It all sounds gimmicky, but mixed into outfits, the references were dulled down into reality. When teamed with plain knits, military nylons, denim, or those moth-eaten Cobain cardigans, you hardly noticed that a lean shirt jacket resembled an Edwardian bodice, or that a cashmere coat’s shoulders were heaped with Victorian passementerie, like a Sergeant Pepper reject.Practicality was worked into many garments: Patches on the legs and seats of jeans were designed not for visual effect, but to serve practical purposes while cycling. The patching will protect your seat and your trousers from the chain; a detached waistband will give you somewhere to hang your bike lock. Clever.Other garments were lined with PrimaLoft, a wind- and water-resistant fabric, combined with luxurious bits of cashmere and velvet. Miyashita also gave his own spin on the season’s staple MA-1 nylon jacket, cutting it as a pullover with zippered sleeves. It felt fresh—which is saying a lot, seeing as we’ve seen it a dozen times a day over the past three weeks.
25 January 2016
Takahiro Miyashita said he'd never heard of Liam Gallagher's label Pretty Green before, but he sure knows his Oasis. Much of this entrancingly back-in-the-day collection was an overt homage to (nearly) all things Madchester. Even Miyashita himself had taken on the mod-fringed, Lennon-bespectacled, sportswear-swathed '90s uniform of the Gallaghers—minus the belligerent swagger. Last season he was dressed like a sleek postapocalyptic cowboy (he could have been costume designed forThe Stand), so it was quite some chord change.Beneath the many instantly recognizable covers of late-20th-century Britpop classics—cable-knit turtlenecks, umbrella-fabric trackies (plus a onesie), dark denim, bucket hats, argyle socks (pulled disturbingly high), Vibram-soled creepers, a fantastic range of Fred Perry-esque half-zip polos, and even a vintage Union Jack flag to wrap Seiya (the model) in—this was more than mere nostalgia trip. Oasis-flavored late-mod was simply the thematic delivery system for this season's expression of the Soloist métier: microscopically observed menswear that bristles with Miyashita tweaks. Thus, that dark denim, some of it polyester-coated, came in a nine-cut portfolio of styles. The Stone Island-ish technical pieces bristled with headphone sockets, tattersall lining, and X-clip collar details, and they were fitted with far more fastidiousness than any self-respectingVanity Fairtroublemaker-frontman cover star would have thought it manly to engage in. A rocking mash-up of Miyashita focus and Oasis blur: mad for it.
23 July 2015