Shinya Kozuka knows how to set a scene. In the past two seasons he’s treated us to a full moon and a swimming pool in the pouring rain, and tonight he erected his runway in a gigantic makeshift cage outside Tokyo’s National Stadium, so that the sound of cicadas chirruping in the trees filled the night air. The show marked 10 years of his brand, and he called it “picturesque or die.”
It’s an apt mantra for Kozuka, whose work deals most overtly in whimsy—see the birthday party balloons and cartoonish cat sweaters here—but with a disarming emotional, almost adolescent sensitivity that fizzes beneath the surface. This collection, he explained, was him looking back on the last decade and figuring out where it goes from here. “It feels like we looked back to our first season and condensed everything we’ve cultivated up until now,” he said backstage after the show.
Onto the clothes, then, which were manic. Colorful miniature houses were crocheted into knitted polo tops or embroidered onto blazers, rainbow tweed was made into jumpsuits and Chanel-esque jackets, and bright daubs of paint were smattered across sweatpants, hoodies, and smock dresses. Toile de jouy spread in pastoral scenes across canvas coats and knitted sweaters, while quaint sketches of buildings or anthropomorphic animals decorated others, like tableaux from a children’s storybook. The overall effect was one of uninhibited joy and weirdness, which Kozuka somehow wrangled into a compelling collection.
Blue—deep, Yves Klein blue—is a recurring reference for the designer, and remained a strong touchpoint this time around, appearing throughout the show (one model burst forth from a painted ultramarine canvas that doubled as a coat). It didn’t stop there: blue were the lights that bathed the space, and blue were the envelopes that contained the show notes, hand-painted by the designer himself. Naturally, the runway was blue, too. “I have two pairs of best friends: two from my hometown [in Osaka] and two I met before I came to Tokyo. If I imagine them as a color, it’s blue,” Kozuka said. “It’s a color I want to cherish.”
As the show ended and we filed outside into the summer night, a spectacular show of celebratory fireworks lit up the sky; they turned out to be from an idol concert that had been going on just across the street. The fireworks weren’t intended for Kozuka, of course, but that hardly mattered. They might as well have been.