In unsettled times, fashion can feel frivolous. And have you read the news lately? That tension has been playing heavily on Akiko Aoki’s mind this season. “There’s a lot going on in the world right now, and wars happening, so I’m really feeling the contrast between fashion and the real world,” she said during a showroom walkthrough of her fall collection.
One of Tokyo fashion’s more engaged thinkers, Aoki had been exploring how to reflect these complex feelings in her collection, which she called “communion and friction.” A marked military proposition—most clear in the sleek belted safari jackets dotted throughout—served as her starting point. “Nowadays in Japan, military clothing is treated as fashion. It isn’t about power or soldiers, it rubs up against reality,” she said.
She also used male models for the first time, seeking to dissolve the boundaries of womenswear. As long as the wearer fits the edgy, lace-lined aesthetic she has carved out for herself, how they identify is inconsequential, she said.
The blurring of identity extended further into the high-low styling: a worker jacket in hi-vis yellow was worn with a silver sequined flapper skirt and pointy heels, while a grand pleated skirt teamed with a cropped and futuristic fleece zip-up. Here was the friction, tempered by a communion of white lace, appearing as sailor collars which draped like doilies over sheer blouses and wool blazers, or as hems peeking out from beneath somber tailoring. The brand’s deconstructivist streak showed in the zip-down-front skirts and stretch-jersey dresses, which were mutated with extra sleeves that could be tied at the shoulder.
It tracked that, in addition to war and gender identity, Aoki had also been pondering the deleterious effects of AI. “We’re living in an age where it’s more difficult to find hope in fantasy, and I think that’s partly because it’s easier to create fantasy than it was in the past,” she said. “It’s made it harder to be moved. But it means that feeling—the ‘oh!’ you feel when something is real—is stronger than before.” More than ever, that’s a sentiment worth holding onto.
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