Harunobu Murata likes chasing the charm of faraway places. This March, he spent a week in the little Italian village of Bellagio to meet with his suppliers around Lake Como, and was enchanted by the quiet elegance of life there. It was a fitting point of inspiration for his eight-year-old brand, which now has its own boutique store in Tokyo and is slowly building momentum as a go-to for well-heeled women in search of their own mode of quiet elegance.
As the rotating handful of models came out on a sunny morning in Tokyo, Murata explained each look to the audience. “The kind of luxury we aim for at Harunobumurata isn’t the ‘exclusive’ kind. It’s more about an internal sense of luxury, this feeling that comes from within,” he said afterwards. “I love the idea of taking memories from a place you’ve visited and bringing that mood back to the city where you live, carrying that atmosphere with you in your daily life.”
To import the Italian fantasy more effectively, the designer had set up a gelato cart—Gelateria Di Harunobumurata—outside the presentation space in Tokyo, serving a spectrum of refreshing ramune blue, coffee cream, and blood orange. The colors of the fabrics, too, reflected the hues in the landscapes he’d observed while in Como.
The pale blue of the water was thus transposed onto a striped shirt dress, the vivid arancia rossa sunset onto a voluminous faille dress, and the sandy stone of the lakeside villas onto beige trousers and cargo coats. Other dresses were opened and gathered at the waist to expose an asymmetric flash of the navel or bare the hips, while the color-blocked pattern on the oversized shirts and sleeveless sundresses, in a pleasantly sheer crepe, made for more democratic vacation staples.
Murata is not simply aping a European ideal of elegance but interpreting it in his own way from a Japanese vantage point, and this time drew it out in a collection of comfortable yet sophisticated wardrobe liveners that will please his clients whether they’re in Tokyo, Milan, or Dubai. “This season was about expressing a mood based on a sensation that remains within you, even if the physical place itself isn’t right there,” he said.
The aircon-blasted concrete bunker that served as this season’s presentation space couldn’t have been further away from balmy Bellagio, even with the addition of a few olive trees and the rattan bistro chairs that served as seating. Still, as the models swanned around the space in Murata’s dresses, they looked so the part of Como society women that we could suspend disbelief for a moment. Of course, the ice cream helped.
