The clothes they wore subverted the golden rules of apparel, offering up a series of radical designs that deviated from pretty much all preceding approaches to fashion: unbalanced outlines, hybridity bringing together textually varied materials, fanciful elements like fluorescent lines almost ripping apart beautiful watercolor-like prints, and exaggerated shapes that looked closer to cybernetic suits from some sci-fi franchise. An aura of the bizarre gradually pervaded the venue, stemming firstly from the unreality of scaffolding erected inside a building, coupled with the peculiar music that seemed to fuse various mechanical sounds with digital voices.
Designer HACHI spent the most sensitive part of his twenties in Harajuku, when it was at its peak in the mid-2000s. The highly diverse and free-spirited style with which he came into contact there surely lies behind the idiosyncratic aesthetic he displayed with this collection. The season took inspiration from different types of outsider (gyaru, otaku, NEET, hikikomori, menhera), all iconic aspects of Japanese society and subculture in the Heisei period (1989–2019), a time that also coincided with the so-called “lost three decades” of economic stagnation. These faintly melancholic cultures were here reinterpreted through a contemporary filter of hyper-pop maximalism to reappear in the 2020s, unapologetic and majestic.
HACHI always plays around with random contradictory elements, from which his creativity derives. Hybridizing everything and anything irrespective of “beauty” and self-remixing his own archive of past material, he aspires to make the unknown. And in so doing, he completely rejects Western concepts of beauty and their conventional hierarchies. In coming seasons, BALMUNG is set to continue steering a course in fashion that always diverges from the rules of the game.