You can often spot kinesio tape on the body of athletes at sport events: the taping method provides indeed support and stability to muscles and joints without restricting the movements, offering at the same time extended soft tissue manipulation.
In the last few years, kinesio tape has also appeared on fashion runways as a decorative element on the models' bodies.
Yesterday instead Anrealage's designer Kunihiko Morinaga established a different relation with fashion and kinesio taping in his brand's collection, showcased during Paris Fashion Week.
The designs that opened the show - that took place at the Palais des Beaux-Arts and that featured a sound direction courtesy of Ichiro Yamaguchi, vocalist, guitarist and songwriter for the rock band Sakanaction - looked indeed as if they were made with a parachute-like fabric anchored to the body by kinesio tape-like elastic bands and straps. In a way it was as if the models had landed on the runway and their bodies were still partially attached to a parachute.
Yet the show wasn't about kinesiology strips: the straps criss-crossing the bodies of the models were a way for designer Kunihiko Morinaga to tackle the themes of power, force and strength.
He therefore continued to address these issues by contracting and releasing the straps that he added in more or less all his futuristic ath-leisure wear.
While these straps also evoked the rigidity of armatures and in particular traditional Japanese samurai body armors, bizarrelly enough they also ended up evoking the draped and gathered garments in Botticelli's paintings.
It was indeed uncanny but not impossible to look at these garments and not to think about Botticelli's angels when seeing Anrealage's soft pink training suits.
The art theme was also evoked by the ample volumes of Renaissance-style sleeves in pastel dresses that called to mind Comme des Garçons' more outlandish designs, while street styles prevailed in the maxi T-shirts and hooded jerseys turned into dresses criss-crossed by more elastic bands.
The bands then became geometrical fabric cages forming the logo of the brand; the cages were overimposed on other garments (maybe showing how wearers will be able to use them in all sorts of seasons) and eventually transformed from performance wear into lady-like pieces forming checks and argyle patterns on light sheer coats and jackets with voluminously sculptural sleeves.
There was a further tension in the designs, generated not by the straps but by the actual fabrics - Morinaga employed indeed for this collection Cuben Fiber.
Also known as CTF3, this is a high-performance non-woven fabric for applications such as yacht sails, airship hulls, kites and performance wear and accessories.
It is a resistant but light weight material marketed and developed by the Cuben Fiber and Cubic Tech Corporations and it is often employed for sturdy mountain gear such as tents and rucksacks.
The catwalk closed with a classic Anrealage finale: models in white outfits reminiscent of fencing outfits walked down the runway, but, when the lights went off and they flexed and stretched, their garments lit up generating green nuances that evoked the colours of aurora borealis.
The trick was possible thanks to the fact that Morinaga used for these garments mechanochromic photonic-crystal fibers - subjected to mechanical strain, these fibers change indeed colour.
These elastic photonic-crystal fibers were the designer's final attempt at making power visible: the mechanochromic fabrics were indeed employed to transform the theme of kinetic energy into light. The light could also be metaphorically interpreted as the energy infused in a garment by the creative power of a fashion designer.
The idea was not new and evoked a bit the electrical parade of luminous grids in Anrealage's "Bone" S/S 2013 collection.
Yet in that case the designer had used UV reactive outer layers for his neon color skeleton-like frameworks; in this case the research was taken to the next level (these garments made you realise that it would be very intriguing to see an athelete outfit changing colour at the end of a competition...).
This time there wasn't a mighty electrical parade on the runway as it had happened in the S/S 2013 collection, but maybe there was no need for it: these days Kunihiko Morinaga seems to be more focused on surprising rather than shocking his audience with studies about the potential of textiles. In a way that's what makes the difference between him and other contemporary designers: rather than just talking about innovative technologies or remixing his or someone else's archive, Morinaga is intent in spotting brand new fabrics with a technological twist about them and actually making collections with them.
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