If everything in fashion by now can be seen in terms of ancestry, than by all rights the conceptual designer Hussein Chalayan should have an heir. He might have found one in Kunihiko Morinaga, who engages in similar lofty exercising of ideas at his label Anrealage. For Anrealage’s Spring/Summer 2017 women’s collection, presented yesterday, Morinaga’s theme was silence, which he manifested by using the technology of augmented reality. He presented a series of garments with slogans on them such as “VOICE OF CLOTHES,” which were hidden under the bands of black fabric with embedded augmented reality sensors. However, were you to download an augmented reality app for your iPhone and look at the clothes through it, the black fabric bands magically disappeared and you could see the writing on the wall… err, the clothes. Seen through the photos, the presentation may have lacked the jaw-dropping oomph of Chalayan’s exercises in bending our minds, and as always the question of the ultimate goal of fashion and fashion shows (i.e. do we need this?) remains, but at least it is something worth pondering.
[Photos courtesy of Anrealage]
