Another reverse pattern puzzle pt.2

future-beauty-rei-kawabukoAnd the follow up to yesterday’s entry comes courtesy of PleatFarm (always a good source for pattern puzzles). The photo in question (as with the others on site) comes courtesy of PF’s sister who attended Barbican’s exhibition Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion in London. The exhibition features luminaries like Junya Watanabe, Yohji Yamamoto -and Rei Kawakubo, creator of yesterday’s source material but perhaps better known by her label Comme des Garçons being a veritable haute couture line (a real one, she’s a syndicate member).

In a manner of speaking, those who suggested sumo wrestler in response to the challenge weren’t far off in that the style is diaper-ish. Perhaps you can see why I said it was Erte-esque. He did a lot of this folding, twisting and turning stuff, using both sides of goods for effect. I thought Alison’s comment about a hammer head shark was humorous; these things are hard to figure out if you’re lacking the context of scale. I wonder how many yards of fabric went into this outfit? Now that is the sort of challenge we should be doing… but then even fewer people would respond to these challenges. Call me crazy but I think one could do better at guessing yardage for this than however many jelly beans are in a jar. And I think we could even argue if so and so were right in their guesstimation without having to drape one up. Such are the heady topics of my work day.

Speaking of Japanese fashion exhibitions -the aggregate of the former being but one lengthy and not even dramatic introduction to the intended subject at hand- the Fashion Institute of Technology is hosting Japan Fashion Now through April 2nd, 2011. If you cannot go, FIT has a collection of videos on their YouTube channel. Another alternative is to buy the companion book, Japan Fashion Now. 9 1/2 x 12 and 240 pages, the cost is $39.95 via Yale University Press or about $26 on Amazon.

I can’t get enough of this stuff. Mr.Fashion-Incubator is threatening to pack me off to Japan sometime this year. If I learned the language, I’d probably never come back.

Get New Posts by Email

One comment

  1. Naomi R. says:

    Haha, I was going to guess Miyake. I love those crazy Japanese kids. One day I’ll reach that level…
    And thanks for the link to Pleat farm. New RSS feed for me! :D

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.