Kimura’s focus this season was an episode in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, a collection of stories from the early Qing dynasty. It’s a scene that forms the highlight of a tale called “The Painted Skin,” in which a hideous supernatural creature wears human skin to disguise itself as a beautiful woman. This “skin” is like a thin film onto which the features of a woman are painted in detail, from the eyes, nose, and mouth to the eyebrows, eyelashes, wrinkles, facial muscles, and even alluring breasts.
Encountering this tale in her childhood, Kimura was fascinated by its grotesque qualities and, at the same time, its almost magical ability to seize hold of the reader and not let go. Ever since, the image of a ghoul wearing human skin has stuck in her mind like a scab and after many years, she finally decided to use it to design clothing. The resulting sheer fabric, figure-hugging ripstop nylon, and stretchy dobby cloth all enwrapped the body like skins worn for transforming into a beautiful woman. The corset-like details, from the zippers to buttons and cord for pulling up the dress, reflected Kimura’s idea of fastening things together as a wearable pelt. The jewelry too, designed like prayer beads with bright red garnets, evoked blood vessels visible under the skin.
The women’s faces on one dress were directly inspired by “The Painted Skin.” There were apparently six in total. These eerie yet sensually beautiful women seemed to be laughing, and yet we could also detect negative emotions beneath the surface: sadness, anger, and melancholia. Various items had dual uses, most prominently the hooded jacket that, with its zippered arm holes for removing the sleeves, doubled as a vest, but also the nylon ripstop bustier and the sarouel pants. Such gestures toward duality are one of the concepts at the core of mukcyen.
This was my first time to see a mukcyen collection, but the degree of accomplishment on display was astonishing, making it hard to believe it was only Kimura’s second season. Titled “covered,” the collection was an attempt to reset the boundaries of reality and unreality through rethinking our relationship with clothes as something that separates the human body from the outside world. These were powerful designs that conveyed a strong sense of the conceptualism long absent from the frontline of the fashion.