Magpie met mannered in Toga’s fall collection, as designer Yasuko Furuta peppered her fine tailoring with a variety of material mashups.
Think boxy overcoats or strong-shouldered pantsuits with the waist whittled down to mere lining material, but then swaddled with multiple cardigan-like waist and hip warmers — or dangling, diagonal panels of sequins.
But the first thing that grabbed your attention were her truly terrific shirts: slim band-collared styles to which you could button almost comically oversize collars. For him, there were more straightforward shirts with regular collars but intricate waist-seaming.
Later in the show, white shirting material came bunched and crumpled into bustier tops — like frosting on her soigné evening ensembles.
Furuta is coming up on 30 years since founding her brand in Tokyo, and she also knows her way around raw denim, black leather and woolen trousers.
Backstage, she cited a wish to experiment with a range of fabrics, even contradictory ones. There was an abundance of plush and hairy textures, sometimes juxtaposed with crinkly synthetics — or just left on their own, as in a spotted brown skirt suit with a jagged hem that had a whiff of the Stone Age chic: Betty Rubble meets Fred Flintstone.
Not all of her pileups were harmonious, but you felt the fun Furuta must have had wrestling with her wide material world.