After 24 previous shows at Paris fashion week, the audience at Kunihiko Morinaga’s label Anrealage learned long ago to keep their fingers close to the record button at all times. Morinaga has conjured up many viral moments thanks to his experimental approach to integrating tech into fashion and his dedication to placing material innovation at the heart of his avant-garde practice. Amongst many memorable moments, he has sent out apparently blank garments that bloomed into color under UV light, transparent pieces that became opaque, LED dresses that functioned like moving screens, and clothes that seemed to dissolve into their surroundings through digital camouflage.
Tonight’s collection was entitled Skin and based around the idea of an outer surface continually shed, renewed and rewritten, with the phoenix, specifically Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix, providing its central image of rebirth. As usual, Morinaga teased the engagement-hunters by presenting analogue amuses-bouches that anticipated the coup de théâtre to come. The clothes were mostly patterned with overlapping scallop shapes, initially printed onto bodysuits and then rendered as articulated scales in a felted Ultrasuede fabric. These became the mutable skin Morinaga was contemplating, used to build pixelated trompe-l’œil reproductions of familiar garments such as denim jeans, as well as slightly indecipherable portraits and robot-like graphics.
Things became more eye-bending, while remaining analogue, with a series of molded skirts whose scales had been flipped 90 degrees to become ridges projecting outwards from the garment. Made using what the house calls “Effective Skin” technology, the 3D-printed scales were colored differently according to angle, so the skirts registered as different shades as the models moved across our field of vision.
Then we flipped to digital with six near-climactic looks. These armor-like cocktail and evening dresses were surfaced with between 1,000 and 2,000 individually controlled electronic-paper scales containing E-ink— not unlike a Kindle. Crucially, unlike LEDs, these emitted no light: the material itself changed color. At the climax the garments pulsated into captivating life, vivid pigments flickering, draining to ash gray and then reforming into increasingly complex patterns in crashing synergy with a live performance of the 1919 version of Stravinsky’s The Firebird. These were incredible, incredible pieces.
At the very end Morinaga threw in a bonus flourish: two updated bodysuits featuring the “digital camouflage” LED technology from last season’s show. These shifted from gray into fiery flashes to simulate the phoenix’s rebirth from the ashes. The effect extended the collection’s central idea of clothing as a skin in flux. Unfortunately, thanks to a bug picked up somewhere in a crowded fashion show over the last few weeks, I suffered a sneezing fit at the exact moment these suits did their thing and missed the crucial moment to record. And if I didn’t post it to Instagram, was I even there? Congratulations to Morinaga on yet another brilliant show.