Toga (Q9347)
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Toga is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Toga |
Toga is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
There was a celebratory air to tonight’s Toga show in London, which was held in a gallery space at Somerset House—and marked Yasuko Furuta’s return to the runway after a four-year hiatus. While this break was initially prompted, unsurprisingly, by the pandemic, Furuta has used her seasonal collections in the years since as a springboard for a variety of more experimental creative projects, including a film by Johnny Dufort and an art photography series by Liv Liberg. These diversions may have suited Furuta nicely—her cerebral approach to design is informed by her close relationship with the Tokyo art world, so her forays into more inventive modes of presenting her clothes never feel like a gimmick—but there’s still nothing like a live show to get the blood pumping.Thankfully, Furuta’s return to the runway did just that. The tone was set with two opening looks: a pair of roomy trench coats with puff sleeves, worn over blouses with checkered handkerchief details at the neck, first on a female model and then a male. Furuta has always taken a somewhat genderless approach to her design, but her inquiries into masculinity, in particular, this season were prompted by watching Claire Denis’s 1999 masterpieceBeau Travail, which charts a tale of obsession between French soldiers stationed in Djibouti. (To wit, the show’s mellow soundtrack concluded with a seat-shaking blast of Corona’s “The Rhythm of the Night,” which accompaniesBeau Travail’s iconic final scene.)Other highlights included a series of high-waist dresses cut from shimmering metallic jacquards and a series of riffs on motorcycle jackets, cropped and asymmetric, in jet black and blazing red. Artfully draped dresses carried a satisfying swish, while the razor-sharp tailoring played with proportions, pairing linebacker shoulders with cinched waists. There was the charming addition of roses, bunnies, and butterflies as brooches to bring a touch of sweetness. And a special shout-out, too, for the killer shoes, which took the steel-toe caps of traditional workwear boots and expanded them into spearlike, hand-finished golden cones.Furuta opted for a salon-style show, with the intimacy meaning you could truly see the clothes (and also occasionally see yourself, thanks to the reflective gold panels on the floor). This is the kind of fashion that deserves to have every detail absorbed, after all: rigorously designed but playful, avant-garde but accessible, meticulously constructed but still unfussy.
It’s great to have Furuta back on the runway.
16 September 2024
This season, Yasuko Furuta gave it the razzle-dazzle—a quick skim through a rail of her clothes revealed some show-stopping sequins, frills, and shine. As is custom, though, the Toga designer’s commentary on her exuberant fall collection was short and sweet: she mentioned states of dress and undress, as well as the spirit of the 19th-century French Romanticists. (More specifically, Eugène Delacroix’s iconic painting, “Liberty Leading the People,” and the expressive strokes that allow its fabrics to fall off the body and flutter in the winds of revolutionary Paris.)But once folded into Furuta’s topsy-turvy world, her references were anything but a history lesson. Take the tailoring, which began with fin-de-siècle suiting as its starting point (note the charming oversized ribbon bow ties), and then tugged its proportions in every direction to create unexpected looks for today’s urban dweller: a sleek black blazer cinched at the waist with an asymmetric oversized belt; a pair of silk trousers featuring explosions of ruffles along the thigh; paneled coats with pillow-like padding at the hem for added swish.Typically, Furuta’s skills lie in her ability to apply just the right amount of restraint to her wilder flights of fancy, so it was fun to see her really swing for the fences this season. A brilliantly bonkers sky blue silk dress featured an enormous ruched cut-out at its center, playfully styled with a pair of black tailored trousers and an enormous black ribbon in the hair. Furuta’s wonky take on plaids saw them folded and stitched over into eye-popping patterns across an especially fabulous skirt. (And that’s without mentioning a kind of minimalist cowboy top made from sequins with fringing that swung from below the breasts.)It was a reminder of all the chatter about the possibility of a new “Roaring Twenties” for fashion a few years back: that bolder, brasher mode of dressing that flickered up post-pandemic, then seemed to fizzle just as quickly, now usurped by the more commercial approach we’ve seen over the past few seasons as the specter of recession looms. (Furuta’s designs may be luxurious, but quiet they’re certainly not.) But her secret sauce, really, is the heart behind the clothes.
She also cited Patricia Highsmith’sThe Price of Salt, the tale of forbidden love memorably brought to life on screen by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in Todd Haynes’sCarol, as an inspiration; more specifically, a sentence in which the protagonist muses on what makes a classic work of art, or film, or literature. It’s precisely that thoughtfulness and sensitivity that makes Furuta’s pieces modern classics of their own.
28 February 2024
Yasuko Furuta of Toga cuts an elusive figure, offering just three words via press release to define her collections each season. This time around, they wereassertive,feminine, andapproach. Taken as a whole, it’s hard not to feel like they could apply to any number of her outings from across Toga’s two-and-a-half-decades as a cult favorite brand: Furuta’s vision is defined by its balance of the sweet and the steely, and the underlying sense that her endlessly curious woman is always approaching the new.The “feminine” aspect was accounted for in the building blocks of the collection: boiled down to its most essential elements, it was made up of lace, shirred cotton, crochet, ribbon appliqués, and plenty of pink. But in Furuta’s hands, it was alchemically transformed into something a little more risky. Those lacy trims and bodices and fishnets clung or fell from the body in a way that whispered of the fetishistic, while the ruched sleeves and necklines had a wonky, offbeat charm that nodded to the creative spirit of the woman likely to wear them.The look book was shot by the Dutch photographer Liv Liberg, a partnership that began when she participated in an exhibition presented by Toga in Tokyo earlier this year, including images of Furuta’s clothes worn by Liberg’s sister and mother. While this time the pieces were shot on models, it serves as a neat reminder of Furuta’s ability to use fashion to turn the mirror back on the women that surround her: to reflect and refract their tastes, but also to nudge them in more adventurous sartorial directions. And despite the quietly intellectual charge of Furuta’s approach to design, there’s a reason she’s been in business for 26 years and counting: there were plenty of wildly desirable pieces in here, too. The button-downs with netted sleeves, or the chunky cotton tops with clouds of embellished black silk popping out from the shoulders? Expect them to fly off the shelves.
28 September 2023
Yasuko Furuta’s latest offering evoked a feeling of comfort, but not in a conventional sense. Patches of faux fur and sheepskin seen on one of the coats looked inviting at first glance, yet a rigid leather belt made clear that it was a functional piece rather than a swaddling blanket.Similar contradictions were featured throughout. Another coat, a faux fur-trim style, was decorated with harsh glossy pebbledash on its front panels. A bonded leather bodice and an appliqué sweater were completely open at the back, secured with utility straps. Double-breasted coats with puffed “Victoriana” shoulders had exposed chest sections. Bulbous cropped puffers, items that typically provide cushioned comfort, fit like urgently inflated life jackets. Two parkas—in khaki and black—were perhaps the most traditional inclusions.The volume and many layers that Furuta added to her looks resulted in a medley of textures: the aforementioned faux fur and sheepskins, scrunched and scratched mirrored vinyl, bold intarsia leather seen as patterns on bags and magazine pockets, and crinkled crunchy nylon in the form of shirting, skirts, and gargantuan “labels” worn as dresses. The nylon in particular was intentionally treated to look as if it had been discarded and “retrieved from the trash.”Amidst the less wearable show pieces (the label dresses), there were practical moments. Giant-collared shirts and cardigans with built-in satin neck attachments can be tied as scarves, inviting the wearer to style them as they so wish, while a pajama-striped thin nylon shirt featured internal straps on the torso that can be pulled back to reveal what’s beneath, or buttoned closed.Furuta didn’t look to a specific reference, and instead conjured a three-word dictum to use as a starting point—a habit she repeats each season. “Reveal, inside, liberation” informed every aspect, but was best exemplified by the Toga logos that decorated outerwear, “revealed” from their usual hidden place inside a garment. The designer evolves at her own pace, to an overall positive effect.
20 February 2023
“Skin, underwear, spacious,” was designer Yasuko Furuta’s signature three-word dictum this season. Her mantras often raise more questions than they answer. You’d be forgiven for anticipating something unexpectedly racy from Furuta after reading it. But that wouldn’t be her style. Instead, the additional skin on show was a hint of a bicep seen through the slashed sleeves of a tailored jacket, or a halter-neck top cut from shirting fabric and twisted to reveal just a little bit more shoulder. The underwear details, meanwhile, came in the form of lace and cotton bustiers that peeked out from behind low-cut tops. Furuta’s interpretation of the ongoing skin-baring trend was about celebrating sensuality rather than anything overtly risqué.Furuta is deeply entrenched in the lively Tokyo art scene—and, indeed, far beyond the shores of her base in Japan, even if she hasn’t been able to travel to present her collections to the international press since the beginning of the pandemic. She has an impressive knack for taking the work of an artist you wouldn’t imagine as a natural bedfellow for her world of wardrobe staples with an acid-lace twist and seamlessly bringing them into the fold.This season, she looked to the work of Eiko Yamazawa, one of Japan’s earliest women photographers, who perfected the art of studio portraiture in the 1920s, before later absorbing the influence of Abstract Expressionism to create ravishing, painterly photographs featuring kaleidoscopes of color. It’s not hard to see why Furuta might have an affinity for Yamazawa, given her pioneering place as one of Japan’s leading women artists as well as her similarly globe-trotting eye, but their work dovetails seamlessly on an aesthetic level too.As always, Furuta’s reinterpretation of the spirit of an artist from decades past felt strikingly contemporary: A sheer, minimalist black skirt sat over a pair of high-waist hot pants in glittering jacquard; oversized crinoline skirts were cut from breezy white cotton that were decadent feeling and eminently wearable. Yamazawa’s artworks, meanwhile, cropped up as patches on richly patterned stretch tops and printed on T-shirts. In their most arresting moments they were blown up and splashed across swishy silk skirts and a dramatic, capelike black poncho. It was Furuta in her element: taking her endless fascination with art history and lending it a firmly of-the-moment twist.
20 September 2022
When describing Yasuko Furuta’s work at Toga, it’s easy to end up speaking in contradictions. The clothes are somehow playful but studied, refined but witty, wildly eclectic yet firmly cohesive. “Hoops, bouncing, swinging,” came the typically gnomic quote from Furuta this season, placing an emphasis on fun and immediacy. The show notes mentioned Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing,)” which you could easily imagine the party-ready, swishy skirt trims of faux goat hair and sequins rustling to on a Saturday night.As always, though, it was Furuta’s imaginative hybridized garments that charmed most. There were plenty of delightfully Frankensteinian fusions at play here: the front fascia of a camel-colored blazer sliced at the sides, so that the sleeves of a thick wool knit emerged from underneath; or in something of a direct reverse, a slinky knit dress with the hems of a blazer peeping out underneath. A super-stretch polyester with lamé jacquard floral details came as a sculptural, voluminous mini dress, as well as in a clingier iteration that featured the same undulating drop skirts as before. The raw edges and cut-out sections carried a whisper of last season’s nod to the sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark with their interest in void spaces, albeit this time with less intellectualizing and a greater emphasis on wearability.While this season’s accompanying film, directed by the auteur fashion photographer Johnny Dufort, effectively conveyed the off-kilter spirit of Furuta’s distinctive design philosophy, her clothes really benefit from being seen in a showroom setting. Going through her pieces on the rack, the quality and heft of the clothes is seriously impressive, as are the wealth of playful details that reveal themselves the closer you look. More strongly than ever this season, there was a palpable feeling that these are clothes that a certain kind of woman—smart, spirited, and willing to experiment—really wants to wear. As Furuta celebrates her 25th year in business with Toga later this year, she only continues to go from strength to strength.
21 February 2022
For Yasuko Furuta’s latest collection at Toga, the designer collaborated with the estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, the American artist who rose to fame in the 1970s for physically cutting through buildings to create eerie voids or splits down their center, a process he described asanarchitecture. Despite working many decades and continents apart, it’s not hard to see where the creative kinship between Clark and Furuta might lie. Just as the former’s interventions transformed unloved buildings into sites of aesthetic interest, so too has Furuta’s uncanny ability to fuse or break apart garments—and, in turn, create radical but alluring new forms—made her one of the Japanese fashion scene’s most intriguing voices over the past two decades.This season Furuta’s eclecticism came together to form a harmonious—and, often, surprisingly wearable—whole. Her experiments with tailoring were a highlight, featuring boxy blazers paired with wonky skirts sliced into 21st-century pteruges (perhaps a winking nod to her brand’s name, itself rooted in ancient dress) and sleeveless jackets cut from classic suiting wools, here embellished with patches of sparkling embroideries or decorated with ruched shoulder pads. These ruching details also appeared on a number of gorgeously slinky knit dresses, billowing out from the skirts for a touch of additional swish.Furuta’s experiments with texture were effective elsewhere too, whether the floral trench coat and skirt cut from an unusual stiff sheer fabric, the variety of glossy fabrics that coursed through the collection, an oversized lavender-hued silk blazer, or a vinyl jacket in an arresting rosso corsa. There’s always fun to be had with Furuta’s unlikely combinations of garments on the runway, but with the spirit of Matta-Clark underpinning the collection, there was a clear sense of intellectual cohesion that gave it real liftoff.
23 September 2021
Yasuko Furuta’s design philosophy is all about radical extremes: mashing up the deconstructed shapes of the Japanese designers she worked for in her early career, alongside riffs on classic Americana and nods to the savoir-faire of her education in Paris. Next year, she’ll be celebrating her 25th year in the business as Toga, having (deservedly) earned a loyal customer base for this relentless spirit of invention. And so, appropriately, this season her ever-shifting sartorial interests struck a lighter, gently celebratory note.In the show notes, Furuta’s mandate was humble: to “simplify, expand, flatten.” The opening look included a knit featuring a repeating floral print and leg-o’-mutton sleeves, with the oversized Peter Pan collar of a shirt underneath echoed in the undulating ripples of the skirt’s shape, carrying both the romance and eerie two-dimensionality of a flower pressed under glass. This delicate touch of craftsmanship ran through skirts cut from rhythmic, wavy pleats. Blazer inserts appeared to flutter and fan apart like the pages of a book. A highly-structured, printed coat had its compressed shoulders against a whitewashed wall in the look book, lending it the effect of a pinned butterfly.Some of Furuta’s most successful experiments in hybridization over the past few seasons have involved playful uses of padding and down. This time, they cropped up in the unlikely form of skirts, as well as hooded jackets that were peeled off the body at the wrists and neck with a timely eye for adaptability. And while the inclusion of paintings by celebrated Japanese artist Tomoo Gokita (a long-time friend of Furuta’s) carried an air of foreboding with their distorted monochromatic faces, the final series of looks in oranges and cornflower yellows—some featuring prints resembling kitschy ’60s wallpaper, others echoing the color palette in feathers and fur—were shot through with a distinct sense of optimism.Furuta excels at finding her own, dissonant harmony among the eclectic elements that make up her collections, one that can vary in success from season to season depending on which unpredictable direction she chooses to take. (Nobody can fault her for her relentless spirit of experimentalism.) This season, she hit the mark with notes of unexpectedly mischievous whimsy. By the time fall rolls around, we have a feeling that’s exactly what Furuta’s fans and followers will be looking for.
5 March 2021
Speedo, the originally Australian swimwear brand and inventor of the racerback and the world’s first non-woollen swimsuit, has co-created a splashy collaboration with Toga’s Yasuko Furuta that made its debut sprinkled amongst her mainline collection today. Chin-strapped swim caps, loose Bermudas, leggings, rompers, what looked like a swim-bustier, bags, and of course swimsuits were delivered in two colorways of an attractively mish-mashed print.Synchronized around the swim was a typically fractured and eclectic collection that Furuta said in her notes was informed by the notion of pulling apart to allow for rebalance: “The splitting redefines the status quo.” True to her promise there was plenty of splits, rips, cut-outs, and enlarged vents in garments that spanned a knit black dress with blue tape details, a pointily bodiced and corseted tricot top, golden glittery tops, a sort of overdress made of criss-crossed sections of satin, checked mashed-up tailoring, and cute cotton dresses with plastic zippers functioning as darting. A scattering of Furuta's abstract jewelry was integrated into most of the looks in this chaotically harmonious collection.
21 September 2020
Yasuko Furuta said in her notes that she “considered the idea of protection in a time of whirling uncertainty,” and although these clothes were not a cure for the relentless concussion of global concern, they might make for a measure of insulation from it. Most notable here (particularly to Moncler) was the innovative use of down. The down footwear worn with matching material pants looked like spike-toed moon boots. A few closing full-down looks sometimes mixed pleating and feather-filled panels, sometimes featured fully unzippable arms to allow conversion into a blanket, and sometimes came spray-painted for extra post-apocalyptic just-woke-up-under-a-bridge-dressed-like-this vibe. This was on purpose: Furuta said the garments were designed to “let you sleep anywhere.” Especially cute were the mid-height block-heeled sandals that featured down-paneled strapping above shivering auras of marabou.Elsewhere, layered full-look knits included integrated hoods, and outerwear came with an extra contrasting layer on the right side—a vivid synthetic green against a beige gabardine trench, an emergency hazmat scarlet against a soothing navy. When the down shoes withdrew, it was to be replaced by a pair of cap-toe oxfords underneath a fine double-breasted coat in some synthetic ivory fur. Another faux fur came with military-style integrated strapping that allowed you to sling it over your shoulder in case a high temperature made its wearing unwise. This Toga collection was the usual bemusing dazzle of deconstruction, a play of texture against shine articulated through the playful imagination of its designer. Soothing it wasn’t but distracting it was.
15 February 2020