As the crowd sat waiting in Yebisu Garden Hall for the start of N. Hoolywood’s AW ‘09-’10 show “Skyscraper,” a pleasant female narrator from a books-on-tape version of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead mumbled text over a minimalist early techno loop. These were not mere English morphemes meant to subtly introduce the collection’s 1940s NYC architectural theme, we soon learned; Designer Daisuke Obana was dead serious about the message. As the models filed out, the novel’s lead character Howard Roark ranted at the audience over early Kraftwerk about individualism, personal creation, and the tyranny of tradition. The clothes, thankfully, bore out the oppositional ideas being spewed.
The collection generally dug deep into a lost legion of ’40s New York styles. The models looked like American “Greatest Generation” teens in the years before they enlisted — “wet” hair sliced with staggeringly linear side-parts. Howard Hughes-style up-turned lambswool collars came on multiple coats. Almost all the suits were double-breasted, with the most innovative model buttoning only at the top and then cutting away in acute angles below.
While many stylistic elements came from recreations of period dress, more abstract ’40s motifs also played a big part. Super-high turtlenecks reached to the chin just as the Empire State Building reaches to the stars. Patterns dabbled in Art Deco and Op Art. Obana may have found his inspiration in old photographs, as he totally avoided color, other than the chance line of red in an overwhelming sea of black, white, grey, washed-out purple, and taupe.
The Roark-worthy innovation however, came in the silhouette, which was bulky to the point of being scandalous. The pieces imagined strong-shouldered robots wandering out of Metropolis, born from an inverted-triangular stylized representation of the male brute. The pants were baggy, often pleated to an Old Folks’ Home level of relaxation. From the viewpoint of the Tokyo hipster crowd, the clothes did not appear to fit the rail-thin Japanese boys very well. But this was Obana firing a round straight into the heart of the over-skinny paradigm that has guided Tokyo streets for the last decade. Obana may have built his success on the ultra-slim aesthetic, but he is apparently now hoping to tear down this past to build for the future.
Playing around with borderline uncool is now Obana’s modus operandi. N. Hoolywood is constantly attempting to re-use retro styles that feel vaguely uncomfortable and aesthetically-suspect. Last season, Obana did it with the Amish, and before that, he made Harvey Pekar into a style role-model. Obana’s raison d’être is apparently resurrecting forgotten styles that exist legions beyond our current tastes — saying to all the fashion editors and buyers in attendance with a Howard Roark-ian unwillingness to compromise, “I don’t care what you think. This is how I shall do it!” On the way out, an editor of a leading fashion title said to me, “I didn’t see anything that I would wear myself,” but that may be the point. N. Hoolywood manages to hit the top of the “Cool Tokyo Brands” charts year after year by producing items that are somehow so painfully square they are painfully hip. He designs; you figure out how in the world you would wear it.
Of course, the post-modern irony is that Obana is not really Roark at all. He is no Modernist fighting against Classicism, but a Retro Archivist fighting against the Contemporary. Regardless, Obana gave us a lot to chew on, and this collection may have been his most daring leap to date from from the safe vintage collector/street fashion world into the more foreboding realm of being a capital-D designer. The obsession with Art Deco and classic ’40s maître d’ style inherently made everything more upscale and formal, but with its slightly-Objectivist conceptual punch, N. Hoolywood showed it had the kind of big-picture cultural philosophy worthy of a leading fashion brand.
Yoshiyuki Morii
Comments