Noir Kei Ninomiya. Fall 2021 - Tokyo Fashion Week

 

(Images:  Noir Kei Ninomiya 2021)

The fashion trend emerging as the world, in a disproportional way, resurfaces from the year long quarantines, is the avant-garde retuning with gusto.   Although runway shows and fashion weeks may not happen till the end of this year or going into 2022, everything is revving up into hyperdrive, vaccination programs in both the UK and America have reached the millions of people, markets are booming and the corporate world is awash with cash.   So, the extravagance of fashion may come back renewed in its visual opulence, which will also be the experimental but also the more exclusive.   In the sense prices, particularly the luxury brands out of Europe, have started to rise substantially to offset falling profits and a wonky Euro currency against the US dollar.  Yet, as the eager resolve carries on all the while we await a future, the creative drive of the avant-garde designer holds a manifestation that reality is indeed a distortion of aesthetics, it's how it can be portrayed either into the functional or obscure.  Either way, the balance is the appeal and indeed Japanese designer Kei Ninomiya of his signature label Noir Kei Ninomiya has been able to achieve since his first showing a Paris Fashion Week in 2016.

Conceptional fashion can be difficult to work into a sellable concept, more so, the avant-garde is essentially the antithesis of fast fashion – in which its rarity and gallery inspired performances are an attempt to depict an artistic longevity, rather than a volume of styles.  To which his mentor Rei Kawakubo over her illustrious career as a risqué designer, has countless pieces of her four decades as a designer held in Galleries around the world, testament to the legacy as one of the founders of avant-garde fashion and its artisan decree.  Ninomiya, is following suit, determined to create the exclusivity within the conceptual even though it holds a resonation to past experimental fashion. His designs are, although a reflection of 1980s and 1990s abstraction based fashion, welcomed as an offset to the commercialization of fashion and its attempts and sourcing multiple markets.

But, is it practicable?  And does it matter?  Ninomiya's Fall 2021 collection titled “Metal Couture” although has some quixotic elements, particularly the metal spiked dresses and tops, yet as so called counter culture aspects of the past have been reduced to no more than a simulacrum of visual dabbling.   Why not offer a more dramatic paradoxical shift of the what is deemed as normality.   I mean, lets face it, on the whole, if one is to look back briefly at recent past events.  Humanity has completely made a meal of the handling of this pandemic and we're not out of the woods yet.  So, let it be an exclusive rebellion, a rejection of the old normal that is the avant-garde in all its extremity.  

Ninomiya's Fall 2021 collection although vanguard in its overture, does also offer a glimpse at his skills in layering styles that are commercially viable, imprinting some Yohji Yamamoto moments, with flowing linen dresses and asymmetrical tops.   It is Ninomiya's protective padding and intricate sheath likes concepts, aligned with his sophisticated noir punk inspired urban stykes that are the most striking.   Yes, there is an emerging light from out of this global pandemic, but the virus teaches, without it being conscious, that humanity when too overconfident and arrogant may need to reflect on its place within the cosmos.   A lesson to be learned, that so far has not being studied. So at this point in time, I prefer Ninomiya's obscurity over the old normal and like Oscar Wilde

once said, “...it is forever.”