When was the last time you felt the luxury of solitude? Even if you could stem the tide of notifications and emails for a moment of peace while you scroll through this review, you’re still plugged in, the hum of information buzzing tirelessly in the background.
It was this forgotten feeling, the rare richness of time enjoyed alone without any outside distractions, that Akiko Aoki set out to capture in her collection this season. “I believe, especially for creators, time spent alone is vital,” the designer said at her Tokyo showroom. She didn’t mean content creators, but she might as well have. “I wanted to explore the introspection that arises in solitude and the distance between the ‘self’ that exists in society and the ‘self’ when alone.”
Aoki toyed with the formality of tailoring and evening wear to make her point, loosening up blazers by opening sleeves so that they draped insouciantly over the shoulders, while slip dresses were cut so that they rumpled at the sides like T-shirts. Conversely, the casual pieces were formalized: hoodies were given sweeping sailor collars, or extended into lace skirts. Other dresses were made from pinstriped suit lining. The point seemed to be to scramble the formal face we show to society and the one we save for ourselves, and thus arrive at clothing that could move comfortably between both.
Aoki’s unorthodox approach to silhouette and tailoring is technically complex; it requires precision—and a lot of toiles—to get right. She’ll often ask pattern makers who specialize in men’s tailoring to work on her dresses. “I think it’s pretty stressful for them since they don’t know the standard way to construct a dress, but I kind of like that dynamic,” she says. “I tell them to just break the rules and go for it.”
The jewelry—thick woven bracelets that were decorated with metal and release clasps that gave them an industrial appearance—was a collaboration with the Berlin-based jewelry designer Ekaterina Pronina, one of Aoki’s classmates from her time at Central Saint Martins. “We met in Paris last year—for the first time in over a decade. I’d seen her work on Instagram and loved her collection, so I wanted to create something with her,” she said. It was a connection worth coming out of solitude for.
