Technoculture Oligo Press
Review
Yuki Hashimoto’s collection took inspiration from the movie Gran Torino, a story about a young immigrant and an older local man in Detroit who, despite their different cultures and attitudes, eventually form a deep friendship. Hashimoto reflected on the nature of Detroit as a place that is home to many migrants and as a cultural melting pot, and found himself thinking about the overalls that are so prized in the working-class city. This universal form of clothing has already achieved a level of recognition as a form of fashion.
What happens when it gets reinterpreted through the unique and topical eyes of a designer? Hashimoto applied his self-taught, innovative approach to both the details and concept of workwear, including its acceptance today as a fashion choice. In addition to the intriguing dissonance that arose from interweaving sophisticated fashion with clothing for manual labor, Hashimoto’s designs had compelling comic touches, such as leather patches that parodied the logo of Carhartt, the Detroit-based clothing company known for heavy-duty workwear.
The more the designs foregrounded the workwear theme, the more Hashimoto’s deft tailoring was overshadowed, but Hashimoto’s almost monomaniacal fixation on the structure of clothing was clearly evident in one particular shirt. It turned two shirts—long- and short-sleeved—upside down and combined them to make a new item. In the photo, the long sleeves are tied around the waist and the shirt is worn like a coat, but what is particularly interesting about this design is how the two shirts appear to be layered on top of each other, with the main part of the short-sleeved shirt inverted and worn over the long-sleeved one. Hashimoto hasn’t simply joined the hems of the two shirts, but expertly attached the short-sleeved shirt with everything back to front, even the buttons, so that it turned inside out perfectly, while the lining of the long-sleeved shirt was treated as the outward-facing part of the item, inverting the buttons and utilizing the lining of the collar and sleeves. In this way, the highly intricate design paid attention to every last detail of the clothing. Taking a cue here also from the upside-down tank top he presented in his spring-summer 2024 collection, Hashimoto also demonstrated superb ability to update his own previous designs.
The T-shirt and denim outfit with burning flame patterns was colored using a special technique called ice dyeing. That ice produced fire is surely more than just a dramatic coincidence and the dyeing process is very intriguing in its own right, but my word count limit prevents me from going into the particulars at this juncture. Hashimoto’s collection was a dense set of designs in which his dedication and preoccupations lurked everywhere, luring the viewer to take a closer look at the details.
