This season has been notably collaboration heavy, and today was no exception. Following fresh examples from Junya Watanabe and Willy Chavarria it ended this evening with a show thrown by one of the masters of the form: Nigo at Kenzo. Following his co-design with Pharrell Williams at Louis Vuitton on Tuesday, Nigo added more miles to the FW25 collab-athon by inviting New York graffiti legend Futura to add his unmistakable signatures to this collection.
“I met Futura for the first time in 1996, in Tokyo,” said Nigo pre-show. “I was a big fan. The first time I met him, he wore one of my designs. It was a windbreaker I had made with detachable half-sleeves. And we started communication back then. So I often went to see him in New York and he also came to see me in Japan.” Futura was also in the audience tonight.
On the clothes, Futura’s atom logo was split with a Nigo-imposed Kenzo-ish flower on blousons, bombers and wide-leg pants sometimes with checked cuffs. It was also applied in larger size via a spray can effect on kimono collar suiting in soft indigo cotton. In accessories we saw Futura’s calligraphy signal Kenzo’s identity on graph paper patterned shopping bags, bouquet wraps, baguette holders and beer bottle baggies, these “because I remember seeing lots of people drinking on the street out of bags like this when I used to go to New York in the 1990s,” said Nigo. This series of pieces also featured tags featuring the word ‘fragile’ in Japanese script, which Nigo recalled noting Futura had used on a T-shirt back in 1990, and was something he’d picked up from a design then popular in Japan. This form of washing and weathering through constant cultural exchange seemed fundamental to the spirit of Kenzo, too.
Elsewhere, Nigo collaborated with the broader sense of nostalgia all his recent looking back, whether with Futura or Pharrell, has stirred. Knitwear decorations were inspired by old school pachinko parlor machines. The thick gum sole loafers with shearling inserts and some Mary Jane leather shoes were in part inspired by a pair of Patrick Cox he remembered hankering for aged 17: “I waited so long to get them.” Roses—a popular motif this season—were there, said Nigo, because: “I heard that when Sean Lennon was 14 and he met Paul McCartney for the first time, Paul wore a rose-design T-shirt: I really loved this story so it is an homage to that.”