Miharayasuhiro
REVIEW
COMPLETE COLLECTION
PARIS, January 19, 2008
By
Mihara's fall 2008 invitation was a star wheel; you could pass the time waiting for his show to start by plotting the position of the constellations at any given moment of the year. The very moment his collection was named for—"After Harvest Moon"—was intended to remind us how important the natural rhythms of seasons once were, especially now that we have been dislocated from such rhythms by the fact that we can get anything from anywhere at any time of year.Quite how this enchanting notion would translate into clothes wasn't immediately obvious from Mihara's catwalk, where the show opened with the sartorially spivvy, in the form of razor-sharp suits. A gray mohair number looked Rat Pack-ready. Then, all of a sudden came a belted, quilted, earth-toned outfit that lacked only a Land Rover to complete the gentleman-farmer image. That was clearly a transition, because everything that followed was a curious hybrid of urbanity and woodsiness. It started with a shirt that had blanket fringing trailing round its hem. The idea of blanket wrapping was soon elaborated upon in wraps and layered kilt-like attachments. That twenty-first-century kilt might sit under a fringed blanket wrap that would be topped by a waistcoat, all of it cut in such a way that it was only visible from the front. Sure, it sounds slightly gaga, but bear in mind that the look was formulated in sober gray flannel. Perhaps Mihara was making a point about the need to integrate city and country (the exoticism of a kilt meaning country from a Japanese viewpoint), in which case he was lucky he once again had the input of London jeweler Husam El Odeh, whose talismanic bone and horsehair accessories injected a hearty gust of Highlands.
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