Departing from the written and linguistic nature of the previous season’s source material—a Chinese tale from the early Qing dynasty—mukcyen designer Yuka Kimura was galvanized not by the film’s plot but its visuals. Anything that we perceive through our sense of sight gradually loses its outline over the passage of time, a process that generates ambiguity, and eventually buries those perceptions in our memory as vague images. The mukcyen collection this season gleaned such fragments and limned them on fabric, in so doing endowing them with individuality under the guise of an afterimage.
Though some aspects of the collection incorporated the film’s titular motif in more obvious ways, not least hiding the shoulder pads of jackets and coats to form the outline of an hourglass, and employing plenty of beige to gesture toward the color of sand, the driving force behind the designs was the idea of afterimages on a screen. The noisy texture of crushed velvet. The rough denim, bleached and aged after dyeing. The pinstripes rendered in uneven, hand-stitched lines. The different shades of blue on a knitted dress. The long goat fur evocative of human hair. The afterimages burned into Kimura’s mind and developed over time then gained new life as such items of clothing, clad in the dark and wet style of mukcyen. And they close in on us with an intensity that is no less than the overwhelming visual beauty of the film itself, and eventually become etched in our memories as new afterimages.
Unique as it is, that conceptualism is both a weapon that asserts the brand’s originality, and a potential Achilles heel that may unwittingly limit its appeal. As such, mukcyen took steps this season to moderate the difficult reputation that clings to the brand. The decision to draw inspiration not from a written but a visual source was part of this. And its first use of denim and sportswear, and the increase in outerwear to appeal to men are signs that the brand is attempting to become more accessible. I am already counting down the days until the next collection by the ever-evolving mukcyen.
Though some aspects of the collection incorporated the film’s titular motif in more obvious ways, not least hiding the shoulder pads of jackets and coats to form the outline of an hourglass, and employing plenty of beige to gesture toward the color of sand, the driving force behind the designs was the idea of afterimages on a screen. The noisy texture of crushed velvet. The rough denim, bleached and aged after dyeing. The pinstripes rendered in uneven, hand-stitched lines. The different shades of blue on a knitted dress. The long goat fur evocative of human hair. The afterimages burned into Kimura’s mind and developed over time then gained new life as such items of clothing, clad in the dark and wet style of mukcyen. And they close in on us with an intensity that is no less than the overwhelming visual beauty of the film itself, and eventually become etched in our memories as new afterimages.
Unique as it is, that conceptualism is both a weapon that asserts the brand’s originality, and a potential Achilles heel that may unwittingly limit its appeal. As such, mukcyen took steps this season to moderate the difficult reputation that clings to the brand. The decision to draw inspiration not from a written but a visual source was part of this. And its first use of denim and sportswear, and the increase in outerwear to appeal to men are signs that the brand is attempting to become more accessible. I am already counting down the days until the next collection by the ever-evolving mukcyen.