Dear Shaded Viewers,
From Rebecca Horn’s surreal extensions to Irina Ionesco’s decadent baroque, Emi Funayama’s latest collection is a manifesto of freedom.
For its fifth anniversary, Fetico didn’t opt for nostalgic retrospection. Instead, designer Emi Funayama chose to charge forward, extracting power from art’s radical edge. The S/S 2026 collection, unveiled during Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo, wears its influences on its sleeve—literally and metaphorically—drawing deeply from the transformative work of German artist Rebecca Horn and the lush, mysterious universe of photographer Irina Ionesco.
Horn, famed for her performance art and sculptural extensions, saw illness and isolation as creative crucibles. Her conceptual pieces—think finger gloves, feathered suits, and cocoon-like constructions—blur the line between protection and entrapment, turning limitation into metamorphosis. Fetico echoes this tension: fringed garments flare with movement, radiating motifs ripple like energy fields, suggesting the body is forever shaping—and being shaped by—its environment.
If Horn reshapes the body, Ionesco veils it in decadent mystery. Her 1970s photography, saturated with baroque glamour and a touch of menace, frames femininity as both fragile and defiant. Fetico channels this with 1920s-inspired lingerie—lace, rich details, and a brooding allure. Far from the passivity sometimes associated with the boudoir, Funayama’s take is active and self-directed, inhabited by women who revel in the atmosphere of danger and intrigue.
“I want more women to be free from such constraints, choosing what they themselves believe to be beautiful,” Funayama declares. It’s a mantra for an age that craves agency and self-definition. Fetico’s body-conscious designs refuse the male gaze, turning instead to a grace that’s modestly sexy and radically affirmative. The garments are for women who remember their own narrative, not for those who must perform one.
After five years, Fetico stands confidently as an author of its own story—a brand with a singular vision of modern femininity, unconstrained by age, body type, or convention. With performance art’s physical intensity and photography’s dark romance woven throughout, Funayama’s label is no longer emerging; it is evolving, and in its fifth year, it offers a rare manifesto: to wear the metamorphosis proudly, and to claim beauty as personal freedom.
Later,
DIane
