Keisuke Yoshida is his own psychotherapist. Each season he digs into his own psyche, examining his insecurities, emotions, and memories to the point of morbid narcissism. He grapples with these feelings by transforming them into darkly seductive womenswear that for the last few seasons has felt almost Oedipal.
As such, the designer’s runway shows are always arrestingly personal and often take place in settings intimate to him (last year he took us to his alma mater). This season the designer chose the ROSA Kaikan, a retro arcade/cinema/bookshop in the old-fashioned streets of northern Tokyo. Yoshida, now 34, grew up a “kagi-ko” (the Japanese term for latchkey kid), and when he was home alone he would escape to the ROSA to read books or watch movies. “It was one of the places that helped fill that loneliness,” he said.
When we had all gathered in the entrance to the building, the sugary anime-style music that was playing in the arcade was suddenly drowned out by eerie white noise, and Yoshida’s women appeared. Wearing ladylike blouses, tightly belted trench coats and pleated floral pencil skirts they paced tentatively through the space like glamorous spectres, their pointed stilettos echoing on the grimy tiles of the arcade lobby.
Silhouettes were characteristically sharp and restrained, with polo necks and blouses tailored tightly at the throat. The shirt blouses decorated with knots are one of the brand’s signatures, and this time were tied across the chest and arms, lending a feeling of constraint and suffocation. Elsewhere things leaned more casual, the clothes less rigorously formal than in Yoshida’s recent collections, incorporating baggier silhouettes and bright colors (see the vinyl oversized raincoats in canary yellow and turquoise).
Some of the models were dressed up and carried dainty clasp bags, while others had messed-up hair and sporty backpacks slung over their shoulders, resembling busy mothers on the school run. Some of the most striking looks were the hooded robes, as if the women had just stepped out of bed; one of them was decorated with a Persian rug print that turned out to be a reference to the carpet in Yoshida’s childhood bedroom, while a quilted jacket recalled the floral print of his mattress.
Backstage after the show, Yoshida was characteristically talkative, letting it all spill out. “For the past few seasons, I’ve talked about how I’ve been confronting my own reality, and in that process, I created an image of a maternal figure in my mind,” he said. “That journey helped me develop a more elegant expression, but it also made me start thinking about the distance between myself and the society I live in, and how that distance manifests in my vision of women.” The casual pieces in the collection were, he explained, a way for him to make it feel more realistic, grounding his fantasy muse in a more concrete character. “Reality is more important than the past, and so I thought I should start expressing that more from now on,” he said. In therapy speak, that felt like a breakthrough.
