Is fashion a visual medium?
I thought clothes were the product of the fashion industry
Speaking to Blackbird Spyplane, Japanese menswear brand Auralee founder Ryota Iwai described the development sequence of his garments: fabric comes first, then colour, then shape. Almost all of the fabric is custom-developed.
Iwai travels the world to source raw fibre directly and develops cloth with mills across Japan’s specialist textile regions, places with generations of accumulated knowledge in wool, cotton and silk. Fine worsted yarns become smooth suiting. Lofty woollen yarns become soft knits. High-twist and densely woven cottons sit clean and crisp against the skin.
The colours follow the same logic: tonal, muted and soft. Beige, grey, camel, cream, washed blue. More recently, brighter notes have entered the vocabulary: royal blue, butter yellow. But even then, colour is rarely the signature feature of a Auralee garment.
The silhouettes are relaxed, but not sloppy. Coats that hang rather than scaffold around the body. Trousers fall elegantly. The Auralee person is not someone trying to dominate the room. They are calm, private, precise. They have money, but the clothes do not play with ideas of class. The Auralee person’s relationship with clothes is a byproduct of a soft metropolitan lifestyle.
This is why Auralee works. This is also a big problem for brands like Auralee.
