Irenisa may trade in stealthy beauty (sometimes to the point of being unassuming), but you can’t fault their prowess in cultivating comfort and tactility. That, they have down to an art. Even better, they evolve and improve upon it each season: trousers seem to billow with ever increasing gentility, and sweeping drop-shouldered coats shrug on with evermore ease. This is due to Yu Kobayashi and Yuji Abe’s astounding pattern making abilities (Kobayashi forged his own scissor skills at Yohji; Abe at the tastefully minimal Tokyo brand Support Surface).
During a showroom walkthrough for this season, the designers—an earnest and intelligent duo—reeled off how they’d achieved their magic this time. A leather jacket, made of thin horsehide, was bonded with jersey material. Robust to look at, it was light as a chore coat when worn. “What we’re trying to do is to change fixed ideas, that leather is like this, into a different form of beauty,” said Abe. The creased cream trousers and button-up jackets, made from wool, also yielded some fabrication secrets. Hand pleated by a specialist in Kyoto that usually works with silk, the fabric is crinkled in such a way that it remains so after washing—a kind of Pleats Please, but using wool instead of polyester. “They’re the only factory in Japan that can do this technique,” he said.
The duo also explored their idea of challenging fixed ideas further, in relation to gender performativity. “Gender is born from the influence of those around us, and at the same time, our own self-image is created by what others think of us,” said Abe. He hadn’t read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, but the thinking seemed to be aligned. Instead, the designers had been looking at Takarazuka, an all-female Japanese musical theater troupe composed partly of drag kings, known for their extravagant, gender-bending shows. While the gaudiness of Takarazuka had been filtered away by the time it came to the clothes, there were some wearable hints of androgyny threaded throughout the collection, namely in the minimal wide-legged trousers that wrapped asymmetrically across the crotch so that they resembled skirts, not unlike a particularly luxurious pair of Thai fisherman pants.
Though its clothes are beautiful, Irenisa benefits from an extra touch of pizzazz to set it apart, and the striking casting in the lookbook certainly helped this season. There are plenty of designers (incidentally many of them in Japan) who are making similar-looking clothes, but none of them feel quite as good on the body as Irenisa’s do. If those super-clean tailored jackets can tempt a passing customer into shrugging them on when they’re hanging on department store rails next season, they’ll more than likely cinch a sale. From here, Irenisa’s challenge isn’t about getting people to open their wallets, but to turn their heads.
