Like many millennials who came of age around the time of the global financial crisis, Keisuke Yoshida grew up with an idea of fashion that has all but disappeared.
Enamored by the glamor of the department store he would walk past on his way to school—the sharp-elbowed mannequins in the window wearing Donna Karan or Ralph Lauren, the scent from the perfume counter drifting through the air—it represented a fantasy, sure, but one that wasn’t as distant as it is today.
“Back when I was a student, a Dries [van Noten] shirt cost around 30,000 yen—something you could manage to buy if you really tried—but now, that’s impossible,” he said. “I felt a sense that high fashion has slipped out of reach for the average person, and so I wanted to figure out how to pass on the kind of fashion I had enjoyed to the next generation and to share that richness.”
This collection wasn’t an exercise in nostalgia, he added, but rather an attempt to weave that lost spirit of fashion into the reality of modern dress. To do it, Yoshida looked at the power blazers and souvenir T-shirts that populated catalogues in the 80s and 90s, and mixed them with the businesslike eroticism he has made his signature, cinching the waists of safari jackets and office shirts to exaggerate the broad-shouldered V-shaped silhouettes. “By tweaking the shape or adding a subtle touch, I wanted to elevate them into something more elegant and sophisticated,” he said. He also removed the throat-clasping scarves that have defined his past few collections, instead unbuttoning the shirts to the navel to allow the looks to breathe, their contrasting collars popped for attitude.
Fittingly, the presentation took place inside the Seibu Shibuya department store, in what was previously an Hermès boutique but is now a disused gallery space. Once a bastion of fashion retail in Tokyo, the iconic department store will close its doors in September after 58 years in business, consigned to the rapidly expanding graveyard of fashion’s golden age. Those days might be gone, but Yoshida is one designer determined to keep the spark alive.
