Excerpt: WHITE MOUNTAINEERING. SPRING 2023

 

"Yosuke Aizawa has steadily refined his benchmark outdoor, utility styles over that last five seasons, beginning with his Spring 2021 collection for his brand White Mountaineering, where he began to incorporate his more tailored and sleeker modernist styles into White Mountaineering's rugged and symbolic looks.  Aizawa, has always drawn on the fusion of Japanese aesthetics with Western urban stylizations, as the merger of defining White Mountaineering, with his base of operations in Tokyo.  Aizawa now resides in the scenic Nagano mountains north-west of Tokyo City, to which the lookbook styles for his Spring 2023 collection were exhibited.

Using the Nagano mountain forest setting as a back drop for his latest array, evoking the inherit spirituality of Japanese natural environments.   One could not entirely see Aizawa's Spring collection as a homage to Zen and esoteric Buddhism of Japan and how important, particularly Zen was when it first began to impact on Japanese culture and aesthetics.  Ensuing a ritualization of art, food and simplicity.  However, Aizawa's styles hold an even mix of both these subtle and blunt concepts, notable to the influences that Eastern solemnity has had on Japanese culture..."

Full review:  https://chiasmusmagazine.blogspot.com/2022/08/white-mountaineering-spring-2023.html

(A.Glass 2022)