Soshiotsuki SS27

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Jun 28

Soshiotsuki SS27 & the Holiday That Never Was

Soshi Otsuki spent a childhood summer at his grandmother’s house in Nagoya, daydreaming about a classmate’s envious family trip to Hawaii. Family time spent in-country couldn’t hold a candle to the palm trees, lūʻaus and oceanic views his friend would regale the class with… Turns out that classmate wasn’t going anywhere either. Everyone was staying home, imagining an elsewhere that didn’t exist for either of them.

This shared, unfulfilled fantasy is what Otsuki, now an LVMH Prize winner with his first Paris show upon him, chose to form the basis of his latest menswear proposition. Named after a Dalí painting about time losing linearity, it’s a better joke than most runway concepts manage in that it’s honest about its own fabrication. Nostalgic collections usually tempt you to suspend belief in the superiority of the past over present realities. But Otsuki’s version doesn’t bother with realities at all. With this collection, he’s recreating the ache of not having one; a longing so specific it has a look, a feel and a style all its own.

Soft-suit jackets are stripped of the already-revered Soshiotsuki lining and paired with baggy pleated trousers or striped pyjama shorts with curved hems worn in improbable double layers for a vaguely 80s slouchiness for the man with an active out-of-office. The kind of vacay fit that called for a complete surrender to serenity, dressed with the seriousness of someone who’d thought about it for 20 years. Other looks are haunted by the ghost of a strict father finally letting loose his collar for a trip the family, in the real world, could not afford. One shirt collar flips out. Shorts refuse to close properly. Lapels curve unnecessarily, because why not?

In full devotion to the bit, Otsuki sourced vintage fabrics for the time-bending reverie with wools and linens yarn-dyed specifically to fake the visual depth and patin that comes from decades of wear and cottons washed to look like they’d survived the sweltering sun and salt of a beachside getaway. As with all good lies, whispers of truth are essential. In the Persistence of Memory, it takes shape in the form of a coat modelled after one Otsuki’s father did actually wear in the 80s, rebuilt from scratch with such technical rigour a vintage logo was reproduced to boot because faking time takes time itself.

There’s something almost defiant in designing this deception so well. The industry loves to throw the word “heritage” around; it’s a word brands lean on constantly to borrow ancestral gravity but it’s even more frequently branded onto designers of colour who couldn’t possibly construct a concept based on anything but their diasporic struggle. Otsuki’s collection creates an honest fabrication based on an unfounded memory with the full weight of Japanese textile manufacturing behind it nevertheless. The father in the collection never actually relaxed on that beach. The fabric isn’t actually twenty years old. But still Otsuki laboured to make both of those things true through with this body of work, dressing a fantasy of a Japanese baburu keiki that could afford to daydream about Hawaii from the position of those who genuinely couldn’t. But rather than despair, it revels all the same, beautifully constructed, generously shared, blissfully unbothered. Given how much of fashion runs on inherited stories nobody really bothers to fact-check, the blatant lies at the heart of this collection might be the most honest thing we’ll see in Paris this season.