Harunobu Murata’s spring collection unfolded on a warm Tuesday evening in the vast glassy foyer of Tokyo’s National Art Center, and served as a continuation of the designer’s stab at high-minded, effortlessly elegant womenswear. His aim is improving every season.
Taking the 20th century sculptor Constantin Brancusi as his starting point, Murata sought to make clothing that would feel at home in an art gallery. The white linen dress in the first look, for instance, was printed white so that its folds almost appeared like a plaster statue. That’s not to say it was stiff; these were fluid sculptures that moved with the body, beginning with a wave of white—toga-like dresses, floaty gowns, and bedsheet skirts—before giving way to peach, buttery yellow, scarlet, and black. Pianist Kirill Richter tinkled the ivories in the middle of the runway all the while, providing a tastefully dramatic soundtrack to complement the vibe.
Later, a trifecta of looks featuring metallic fabric recalled the iridescent rainbows of spilled gasoline, achieved by covering the fabric with silver foil and combining it with a sulfurizing agent in a collaboration with Nishimura Shoten, a hundred-year-old workshop based in Kyoto. “It’s like a sculpture that is exposed to rain and changes color, capturing the flow of time within a single dress,” he said after the show. There was impressive pattern work on show too, with dresses pinned to the side so that they fell in rich, asymmetric folds, or fine silk blouses with cutouts at the hip.
Murata operates largely in the realm of occasion and evening wear, but down-to-earth touches in the form of oversized shirts and light-as-air raincoats were also in the mix. “I started off with this very sculptural approach but gradually changed the styling to make it more wearable and realistic. I wanted it to have the essence of everyday life,” he said. As for how Murata’s wearable sculptures will translate to real-life wardrobes, the impeccably groomed Tokyo women who always sit front-row at his shows—their moisturized cheekbones and décolletages catching the light like polished linoleum—are as good an advert as any.
