Koji Kamiya set his show at a Go-Kart track in Tokyo Bay, with the blue and white barriers that snaked around the space serving as the seats. The menswear designer is a protégé of Mihara Yasuhiro (and is part of his company), and has a grungy aesthetic similar to that of his mentor, though Kamiya’s clothing is more straightforwardly wearable and less avant-garde, focusing on references to ’90s menswear and Americana staples that remain fairly consistent each season.
Kamiya’s defining trick is that—through his clever fabrication skills—he is able to make his new clothes look convincingly worn and distressed as though they had all been unearthed at some wildly cool vintage store. This time there were faded Oxford shirts, Cobain-ish distressed cardigans and striped mohair sweaters, fleecey board shorts, and subtly oversized trad suiting worn with striped neckties. Particularly fun was a nylon MA-1 bomber that had fringing across the chest for an interesting military cowboy mix.
His gang of models emerged from a cloud of smoke for the finale, each one riding a BMX or lowrider bicycle, cruising down the runway like cooler-than-thou delinquents. Backstage after the show, Kamiya explained that it was a throwback to how people would communicate before DMs and emails had taken over our lives. “Nowadays everything is electronic, so I thought that a messenger who receives info from people and passes it onto others by riding around on a bicycle is a wonderful image,” he grinned. He called the collection “Messenger” and printed the word on the back of faded souvenir jackets with a helmet-wearing cartoon roadrunner.
Indeed, though he looks like the picture of a contemporary Japanese cool kid, Kamiya is an old soul whose love for vintage clearly runs deeper than the clothing—this collection could be read as a yearning for simpler times. The grungy 1992 hit “Leave Them All Behind” by Ride soundtracked the show, but faded into a softer classical song for the finale that gave the impression that Kamiya’s BMX riders were riding into the sunset. “I wanted it to be like the end credits of a movie,” he laughed. “It sounds silly, but by making it feel kind of sad I wanted to evoke some rebellious memories of the past.” Not another teen movie—this one was worth a watch.
