Tokyo Diaries VII

A mental travel preparation.




Benetton Kokeshi Dolls, 1999

An early introduction to Japanese street style, rapidly westernized as inflationary virus. Yet, one wishes to encounter its true and sincere form when putting the first step on Tokyo ground.
/HORST

Fashion Charts

1. Raf Simons Fall/Winter 2014

2. Junya Watanabe Fall/Winter 2014

3. Dries van Noten Fall/Winter 2014

Longing for patchwork, from punk to Pitchfork. A common ground within the expected (Junya), unexpected (Dries) and anticipated (Raf). A secret pact between the artistic, commercial and hyped. My top three.
/HORST

Paths Towards Modernity III

A fictive documentary in art and fashion.

1. Walter van Beirendonck Spring/Summer 2014
2. Isa Genzken Bouquet, 2004
3. Isa Genzken Mutter Mit Kind, 2004
4. Isa Genzken Oil (Detail), 2007
5. Walter van Beirendonck Fall/Winter 2013
6. Walter van Beirendonck Fall/Winter 2009
7. Isa Genzken MLR, 1992
8. Isa Genzken Schauspieler, 2013
9. Nick Knight Dream The World Awake, 2011
10. W&LT Fall/Winter 2009
11. Isa Genzken Schauspieler, 2013
12. Isa Genzken Installation view, 2012
13. Walter van Beirendonck Fall/Winter 2012
14. Isa Genzken Fuck The Bauhaus, 2000
15. Walter van Beirendonck The Sequel, 2009
16. Walter van Beirendonck Spring/Summer 2008
17. Isa Genzken Installation view, 2012
18. Isa Genzken Mona Isa X (Gold), 2010
19. Walter van Beirendonck Fall/Winter 2013
20. Isa Genzken Schauspieler, 2013
21. Walter van Beirendonck Spring/Summer 2009
22. Walter van Beirendonck Landed-Geland Part I, 2001
23. Isa Genzken Ohr, 1980

Cardboard, plastic, mirror, spray-paint, acrylic, metal, textile ribbons, light ropes, mirror foil, colour print on paper, MDF and casters. Materials that constitute the fashion collections and art installations of Walter van Beirendonck and Isa Genzken. Glitter foil and foam structures are their totems of popular culture, stacked on top of each other.

Rather than propelling a material-ist approach of 'readymades', the works function as allegories. The matter's value is absolutely neclected and the singular parts taken out of their original purpose and meaningfulness. By re-combining this 'material', Beirendonck and Genzken create new bodies, structures and machines that are abstract and futurist in form but reminiscent of everyday, well-known ideas and domestic objects.

The end result is a 'transformational cluster' of non-related parts that are forced or molded into a new grouping. Similar to child play or alchemist experiment, both figures follow the human urge to explore the principle of cause and effect. A 'what-happens-if' working mode.
/HORST

Hip Teens Over 30

Yohji Yamamoto Spring/Summer 2014

Have we yet discussed the best collection for 2014? Junya Watanabe was quite close - with shredded hippie anti-structures. And now, after a few weeks of thinking, I came to the conclusion that it is Yohji's time. Fluoroscent neon bigotry, disgusting, hip and trendy, self-questioning, fantastic.
/HORST

Couples IV

1. Marc Jacobs Spring/Summer 2014
2. Claire Barrow Spring/Summer 2014

When menswear and womenswear go hand in hand, and - unknowingly - reflect each other. For Spring/Summer 2014, Claire Barrow and Marc Jacobs created a genderless, enhanced fashion experience. Fearless and transgressive, postwar power couples.
/HORST

Post Paris XXXIII

A 'False Encyclopaedia' double feature with John-Michael O'Sullivan, discussing:
Raf Simons Spring/Summer 2014

It's a boy/girl thing.

Before Raf Simons became boldface RAF SIMONS, he was just a shy Belgian student, hanging around with the cool kids - kids like his girlfriend, Véronique Branquinho, who would go on to collaborate with him at Ruffo, and to teach at the same fashion school in Vienna. And though Simons' star quickly outshone Branquinho's, you get the sense that he's never entirely shaken the vestiges of that outsiderish-ness, that lack of the intrinsic cool which Branquinho so effortlessly had.

The surfaces of this collection were so alive with associations to the past - the neon-pink shoulders from AW09, the rainbow stripes from Jil Sander Spring 2011 - that you had to pick away to get to the nancy-boy softness of thigh-grazing polo shirts, pinafore vests and fluid tees. Increasingly, his own-label collections seem as much about the flesh left exposed - the lean, gangly legs and arms emerging from cropped shorts and sleeveless shirts - as they are about the garments themselves. And the barrage of slogans (like the Jean Prouvé house, and the Calder mobile, and the Warhol illustrations stamped onto his last Dior womenswear collection) felt like semaphore; appropriated shorthand for a message that Simons won't, or can't, quite articulate.
/JOHN-MICHAEL

Undeniably, there is some kind of excitement attached to Raf Simons. And when you divide its parts, there is nothing exciting about it. Maybe it could be called 'Analytic Pop'. Ordinary things we know, signature ideas we crave, irritation we surrender to. Rave and advertising. Subculture and commerce. Raf is selling himself, selling out, selling dreams. A mass-media machine, a masturbation factory, a perpetuum mobile. The TV station that will exceed MTV. We have to admit the 'happy yeah' and swallow the pill.
/HORST








1. Raf Simons Spring/Summer 2014
2. Jean Prouvé 1962 & Alexander Calder 1957 & Raf Simons 2011
3. Helmut Lang Spring/Summer 2004
4. Raf Simons & Véronique Branquinho Ruffo Research, 2000
5. Andy Warhol Four Dollar Signs, 1982
6. Damien Hirst Lullaby, 2002
7. Dior Fall/Winter 2013
8. Raf Simons Spring/Summer 2014

All about John-Michael O'Sullivan