Nostalgia has cunning ways of taking over one’s thoughts. Today, Mihara Yasuhiro employed his spring 2024 collection as a compass to guide him through a labyrinth he described backstage as a “lo-fi memory haze.”
Yasuhiro was a young boy when the Berlin Wall came down, and he recalls the mood of the time through a mishmash of memories, many revolving around the music of the period, and others, of course, around the fashion. “The ’90s went by as if we were living too fast, and even now, memories of that time sink and float like ingredients in a soup,” the designer wrote in his show notes.
His approach to evoking that time, he explained, involved making all his clothes this season look “vintage.” There were grungy sweaters ripped as if they had been well worn and well loved for years before they hit the runway, and the light summer cottons were treated through a process of repeated spraying and dyeing to make them look aged. The clothes had a patina that conjured age and the passing of time. Had it not been for Yasuhiro’s contemporary proportions and styling (with an emphasis on layering, tying and cinching), one could have been looking at faded photographs of a different era.
The designer’s proposal for the season was grounded in what he called “the big silhouette.” Outerwear pieces ranging from knee-long hoodies to utility vests, parkas, and button downs were supersized into engulfing, hulking silhouettes without, surprisingly, doing away with their lightness. Yasuhiro also cut slits on the sides of the pieces so they could be worn as capes with the sleeves hanging to the sides—a clever (and functional) way of having the pieces maintain their billowing proportions intact. The impetus for this idea came from Yasuhiro’s memories of wearing his brother’s clothes when he was young. They were always too big on him, he said, but he’d wear them anyway and find comfort in their cocooning ways. A run of plaid button downs worn as coats and a set of distressed hoodies made the best bridge between the designer’s ’90s grunge inspiration and fashion today.
Another Easter egg from Yasuhiro’s childhood came in the shape of triceratops and T-Rex handbags and cross bodies, a nod back to his obsession with dinosaurs as a child. There were also cassette tape wallets worn as lanyards and, to this reviewer’s delight, magazine cover clutches featuring back numbers of cult street style magazines STREET and FRUiTS, which first went to print in 1985 and 1997, respectively. These were playful and sweet but not saccharine, and pulled the nostalgia away from melancholia.
There have been several callbacks to boyishness on the runways this season, but Yasuhiro’s felt positively earnest. If there’s one thing that can make these projections of nostalgia enchanting, is when they come from one’s own memories, haze and all.
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