Agenda-setting intelligence, analysis and advice for the global fashion community.
PARIS, France — The Eighties are having a huge comeback this season in Paris and elsewhere. It's a matter of big shoulders, banana-shaped trousers and curvaceous hyper-bodies redesigned by clothes, of course. But it is mostly a matter of a codified depiction of womanhood: strong, assertive, sensual and in control.
Back then, the Miyake wonder woman was on a league of her own: capturing the zeitgeist with an all defining air of tribal futurism. The vision was so forward-thinking, it could easily be translated into the present tense, even better outside of the 1980s trend. It would surely make the Miyake identity more strongly felt.
Instead, what do we have? Challenging and utterly innovative fabrics shaped into cocoons that variously wrap the body depicting a rather sweet, kawaii idea of woman — or girl, to be accurate. Along the way, the strength, the stubborness and the allure got completely lost.
Designer Yoshiyuki Miyamae is doing ok. But he keeps focusing on the fabrics, forgetting that it is the vision of a woman translated into shapes that carries a house like this forward. It is a pity that all the Miyake innovation keeps being narrowed around pleats: it's a diminishing effort. It's time to dish out something bold again. Pleats, if necessary, will follow.
