What is the difference between a gimmick and a good idea? One lets your grimas, the other lets you grin.
With that statistics, the enchanting, cheerful catwalk show of the Japanese label Anrealage, on Tuesday afternoon in Paris, was a very good idea.
Because after Already seeing clothes so square that they looked like something from “Minecraft”, and after Witnessing platform shoes in the form of slip-on cyber trucks, when the Blocky designs of the label then when an arcade game are agitated, was the only correct reaction to grin.
As the designer Kunihiko Morinaga explained after the show, these clothing were produced from yarns that were lined everywhere with Teteny led ‘balls’. Imagine a Times Square Billboard packed in a waving pocket dress. Each design had a battery and sensor, so that the Display Backstage could be manipulated. (The material is owned by Anrealage and has been developed with MplusPlus, a Japanese technology design studio.)
The result was crossed as “Tron” with “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
Three flickering dresses remembered the lights of a skyscraper in the hands of a hyperactive toddler. They marched a few models on side, their Tartan Kade ping-pong-shaped colors back and forth to form new kaleidoscopic tartans while they pushed.
For the final, models went together, their dresses that are static in the Pixely way of a TV on the Fritz, and then to be solved in a stained glass motif, an apparently nod to the American cathedral where the show was put on.
This collection, Mr. Morinaga, said Backstage through a translator, was inspired by a decent archaic technology: two -sided advertising magazines that “sandwich men” use for companies.
“Before the design was always resolved, but now we can move the design,” said Mr. Moringa.
Here was a fashion show that seemed to accept our technically advanced age. At least it was a reminder of how static fashion can be. Almost all other labels that are shown in Paris Fashion Week continue to use the same wool and cotton that have been in circulation for centuries.
Not Mr. Moringa. He is Carl Sagan of fashion, who tilts to the cosmos to wonder how far a man can take a dress. His earlier exploits include clothing that blown up the catwalk and tabula rasa enembles that adopt patterns when they are subject to UV light. It is a missed chance that an Olympic team Mr. Moringa did not create his sorcery on their opening ceremonies for the Parisian competitions.
“Fashion is something that never stops and always moves and changes,” said Mr. Moringa, together with his ethos.
He strives for the future. Even if there are not many who seem willing to join him there. Yet.
While we got out of the Paris streets, it was difficult to imagine that someone shot beside me in a digitized “Starry Night” dress. None of our clothing still had LCD screens on it. What we wore was that grin. And maybe that was the purpose of Mr. Moringa always.
