Were the world as Maiko Kurogouchi describes it in her collections.
Season after season, it seems a place of wonders where, say, the sight of a hazy mountain ridge leads down a poetic path filled with wildflowers, delicate Japanese-made glass and innovative applications for century-old crafts.
For fall, time split between Tokyo, where she and her company are based, and the mountainous region around her hometown of Nagano had her consider her silhouettes as “transparent landscapes,” in an approach that continued her dreamy spring lineup.
With a magpie eye, the designer sprinkled motifs and textile effects derived from her observations through translucent surfaces — emerald-green pressed glass with floral motifs, shoji paper screens or a window covered in morning frost.
Only this time, the buildable sheer layers had a more practical vibe that Kurogouchi attributed to her own needs as her brand’s first client, she joked before her show.
Exhibit A: the technical nylon used for anoraks and trousers midway in the show as well as a handful of backpacks that nodded to mountaineering gear, although heavily filtered through Kurogouchi’s elegant worldview.
This dash of sporty-cool didn’t tip the scales away from the Kurogouchi-typical mélange of sophisticated fare, with generous robe coats in thick cashmere, blazers cut long but with a shoulder just oversize enough to give elegant slouch and knitwear that spanned from fuzzy chimneyneck sweaters to sheer multilayer dresses in misty gradients.
Other highlights included a T-shirt with a novel printing technique that yielded a glass-bead surface, albeit one that could be industrialized, and a dramatic hooded coat in what looked like a type of dévoré floral fabric. It was cotton voile overlaid with washi paper, with patterns outlined with a fixing agent. Once washed, only the motif remained. Kurogouchi said she found the technique at an interiors specialist who had developed it and shelved it.
Such ideas are what save her label from ever being mere “quiet luxury” and keeps her devotees coming back for more.