Shinya Kozuka’s Spring 2024 show took place in the sprawling outdoor plaza of the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium Sub Arena, where he took us on a sleepwalking walk under the full moon. It was fitting: Kozuka’s message this season was taken from a story where writer Natsume Soseki translated “I love you” into the infinitely more poetic “the moon is beautiful, isn’t it?” Not every designer can bend the sky to his will, but the weather gods were clearly on the side of Kozuka tonight.
Back on Earth, there was still some cleaning to do. The models were too far away to see them at first, and when they got close enough, the floodlight was so one-sided that their fronts were in shadow. If you could see them, sometimes there was so much going on with the clothes that it was hard to parse out the details.
On the other hand, what Shinya Kozuka does is likeable precisely because it’s all a bit crazy and wonky. An alumnus of Central Saint Martins, he has something of a London sensibility about his clothes, in that they can seem a bit hodge-podge and experimental (his inspirations range from Raf Simons to Margaret Howell to Dragonball), but are ultimately charming – take a look to those honk-shoo nightcaps!
Many of the pieces are decorated with Kozuka’s original sketches, which he creates on his iPad, which look like scribbled toile de jouy. “I always take pictures of what I think of or what inspires me, and I develop the collection from there,” he says. This time they depicted the banal beauty of everyday life, so the oversized tailored clothes and denim were printed with scenes you might see on the street: an old lady walking on her shiba inu; the welcome sign of a tonkatsu restaurant; merrymakers stumbling home from an izakaya. “I think clothes are part of a person’s life,” he said. “Just like when you go on a first date and confess your feelings to someone, the clothes you wear become part of that experience.
Kozuka had also thought of the Yves Klein blue and was struck by how well the color matched the blue-and-gold aluminum cans of The Premium Malt’s beer he often sip on his walks. This, he said, provided a well-known point of reference and served as the color palette for the collection. The resulting broderie anglaise shirts, gold brocade pajamas, tinsel waistcoats and blue silk bomber jackets were individually special, and could very well be worn on many of those spring first dates.
