“The more simple we are, the more complete we become.” Has Sacai’s Chitose Abe been normal-pilled too, like many of her designer peers? After 15 years of hybrids, she played it straighter than usual this season, or at least as straight as a slouched-on jacket with slashes for pockets where the skin peeks out can be.
It’s useful to know that it was Auguste Rodin who said the words that were printed across a couple of t-shirts in this collection, as well as the one Abe wore to take her bow. The groundbreaking French artist made sculptures with complex, uneven, ‘emotional’ surfaces. Abe may be preaching simplicity, but there was still a lot of play and experimentation here.
Pillowy volumes were her chief preoccupation. Jacket and shirt sleeves were sewn with arching seams, creating a side-to-side silhouette that was almost circular, and the bodies of the pieces were bisected by another seam that produced their rounded shape front-to-back. The way they were constructed gave them undulating hems, sometimes exposing a flash of midriff. As generous as the clothes look in these pictures, typically there was even more volume at the rear of garments. A trench and shirtdress were designed with Watteau backs.
Though she was working with a lot of material, the vibe wasn’t prim. The slashes that stood in for pockets in an early jacket became a running motif. On the final look, a long narrow dress in menswear pinstripes and black silk, she added extra slashes below the hips, giving it Belle Epoque proportions that Rodin might’ve recognized. Not so simple, in the end, but the absence of complication did reveal something new about Abe: She cuts a terrific pair of leg-elongating pants.
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