Ryunosukeokazaki Tokyo Spring 2026 Assortment

Ryunosuke Okazaki is doing it all of the mistaken method round. Beginning on September 13, the 30-year-old designer can have a month-long exhibition devoted to his work on the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Often designers have to attend till they’re useless for that form of honor. And right here’s the actual kicker: Okazaki has by no means bought a single merchandise of ready-to-wear clothes.

Like Rorschach prints made vogue, his works are created by a course of the designer likens to prayer, and are impressed by the animistic spirituality of Japan’s peaceable Jomon interval, notably its pottery. The V&A showcase, known as JOMONJOMON, marks the designer’s European debut, however not his international one: one in all Okazaki’s clothes was chosen for the Met Museum’s “Sleeping Beauties” exhibition final 12 months, and he has held displays of his work in Hong Kong and Beijing.

This newest assortment, which is his largest but at 29 seems to be, and his first in over a 12 months, marks a turning level. To clarify the evolution, Okazaki held a particular walkthrough at his residence in Tokyo, the place he had ready a small military of mannequins that regarded like cosmic gods. Nice curves swept over the human kinds in gold, mint, and black. Different items have been cherry blossom pink, ending in two curved factors that crossed over on the ft, or increasing from the physique like a flower or an alien exoskeleton.

The place Okazaki’s clothes to this point have been principally fabricated from linear buildings, this time there have been extra materials and draping, nudging his work gently into the route of real wearability. “I’ve been interested by doing ready-to-wear for some time, and I’m lastly making progress on that,” he stated. The gathering additionally contains his first ever equipment: Vibram-soled Chelsea boots embellished with undulations of fake leather-based on the sides, and black and burgundy purses that curve into smiling sculptures. He’s at the moment engaged on an e-comm web site to make them in the stores. And although he has beforehand resisted vogue’s conventional present schedule (this assortment is formally titled 004, not SS26), Okazaki additionally stated he intends to start making seasonal collections.

This 12 months marks the eightieth anniversary of the atomic bomb assault on Hiroshima, the designer’s hometown. “I feel it is a good time for folks everywhere in the world to consider what occurred there. I hope [my work] will give folks an opportunity to assume, even when just a bit, and I feel it’s necessary that we proceed to claim that warfare is pointless.”

Gathered in Okazaki’s sunlit front room, his creations took on a celestial presence, as if a council of clever and historical beings from a extra enlightened time had descended to earth to carry court docket. “I intend them to evoke a way of the facility of life,” he stated. They’re highly effective works that can rightly be dedicated to vogue’s historical past books; within the meantime they carry a message that deserves to be proven far and large. Can a bunch of strange-looking clothes actually encourage hope for humanity? After all they will. Go and see for your self on the V&A subsequent month.