If he wasn’t a fashion designer, Harunobu Murata would make an excellent architect.
The Jil Sander alum had spent this season thinking about Adolf Loos’s “Ornament and Crime,” a modernist manifesto which posits that, for culture to evolve, ornamentation should be eliminated from useful objects. Murata’s approach isn’t quite so severe as that, but he is a minimalist, and the inspiration served to bring restraint to the collection. Rather than the usual runway, it was presented for the first time in a showroom to give us a chance to take our time appreciating each piece up close.
Murata, holding the floor like a lecturer, described the collection as a cityscape. The vertical silhouettes that resulted were both structured and fluid: coats had high collars that stood up straight like skyscrapers, but then melted into folds of fabric belted at the waist beneath. Murata is especially good at designing for movement—the alpaca coats were sumptuous enough on the hanger, but really came to life on the fitting model that did a lap of the showroom. It was elegance, by design: “The drape is really created as you move, but in a more stoic, calculated way,” he said.
The draping was helped along by a marked upgrade in fabrication for the brand and a sophisticated exploration of texture and color. Part of it came through in the expanded knitwear offering, which included ribbed knits with gradient dyes inspired by the pattern he’d spotted on the wood grain of a nearby building, and denim, which was bleached to give it the look of weatherworn concrete. Bias-cut satiny dresses were broken up with diagonal torso panels, adding an extra dimension of light and texture.
Murata’s designs have already charmed the well-heeled women of Tokyo society (the brand opened its first store in the city last year), and he is currently looking to make inroads into the European and American markets. “We’re currently in this preparation phase, getting ready to jump,” he said. Full of momentum, this collection will give him just the boost he needs.