Compared to women’s, men’s clothing is inherently boring. For years, I’ve seethed with jealousy at the vast array of options women have when getting dressed. When it boils down, men’s clothing is always some variation on trousers and a shirt.
My solution has always been the same: layering. Shorts over trousers; shirts over shirts over shirts; cropped jacket over trench; sleeveless over long sleeves. It’s a way of finding shape and texture that expands past the entrapping history of men’s fashion. The other option is to wear things wrong: to button incorrectly, wear things backwards, inside out, and upside-down. Maybe, secretly, I love the simplicity of men’s clothing but dislike the regulations with which we are expected to wear it.
Many of the looks in Kolor’s FW26 collection were a refined amalgamation of those experiments. Layered garments melted into one like a Frankensteinian hallucination. Time, material, and intention were stitched together in a vision of sweet, oceanic ecstasy. A detached shirt collar sat underneath a multitiered coat, with buttons sprouting like crops across appropriated vintage fabrics. A skirt fell over trousers. A dress folded inside out, lapping the body like waves. Everything was held together by chains, keys, and winding stitching, as though the garments would slowly unravel and return to scraps as the models stormed down the runway.
The collection drew inspiration from the cold winter sea, its deep seductiveness and inherent danger. Citing references like The Lighthouse by Robert Eggers and Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, creative director Taro Horiuchi invokes aesthetic references of fantasy cultures related to the ocean: lighthouse keepers, mermaids, sailors, shipwreck survivors, and ferrymen. The sea is a place of myth, not of reality, and Horiuchi frames his many experiments in form through grandiose mythic storytelling.
He presented a wardrobe that seemed battered by the waves, like clothes smashed and tumbled against rocks before washing up on shore. They found themselves draped across bodies by chance, or by survival. There seemed to be a class-based structure to the looks: the shipwrecked survivors, the rescuers, and the onlookers. This allowed the collection to flow through levels of finish and production: ragged greys met high-visibility yellow; sharp tailoring met unraveling knitwear; bioluminescence met tartan. The result was a collection that didn’t look to the future, but was instead aligned with the Temporal Fold theory – a belief that time does not progress linearly, but collapses in on itself, looping and echoing.
The sea is a total body of water, both ancient and contemporary. It is not produced, but regurgitated. I use the sea as a place of prayer. Its endless vastness and destructive personality mimic a god-like entity. To stand in cold, lapping waves, staring up at a beating moon, gives dreams unlimited power to sail across whole worlds. Whether that dream is one of epic fantasy or of a simple need to revolutionise the basics, we have been provided with a taut, stretched spectrum on which to cast our deepest desires. Kolor asked us to throw a penny into a well, to close our eyes and make a wish.
