Many shows for fall 2025 will come with more hype, carry more clout, seat (many) more influencers, and expend a great deal more budget. Yet I’d wager that this Anrealage show will not only be one of the most viewed this season (especially in video), but more than any other will also continue to be referred to for years to come. Because it looked like the beginning of something new: clothes that change you, whenever you want.
Okay, it wasn’t quite the beginning. Hussein Chalayan integrated LEDs into a collection nearly 20 years ago. To compare the two, however, is like comparing Google Glass with Ray-Ban Meta. Where Chalayan was once a pioneering precursor, Kunihiko Morinaga today returned to the idea—and this time, he had the technology.
As Morinaga explained pre-show, the potential of the fabrics he co-developed for this collection led him to think about how they could turn our existing relationships with screens inside out. That was why the silhouettes of his pieces and their 3D-printed shoes echoed the pixellated blockiness of Minecraft and Roblox. Morinaga said he was also thinking about those cheesy personalized SNS avatars, and the compulsion across the metaverse (remember that?) and other massively multiplayer environments to reskin our digital selves.
The first 12 looks were analogue printed versions of the screen fabric versions that followed. There were up to one million pinpoint sized LEDs incorporated into each screen fabric garment, the designer said: Comparing the analogue prints with the screen transmissions was akin to comparing a printed newspaper with a package published digitally.
The content he started with reflected the stained glass designs all around us in the American Cathedral in Paris. Combined with the ruffs in some looks, these shimmering ecclesiastical patterns floating down their nave runway recalled Danilo Donati’s illuminated clerical robes for the Vatican fashion show in Fellini’s Roma. Morinaga and his technological collaborator MPLUSPLUS had developed 60 patterns that could be incorporated into the LED scattered light-permeable fabric: They gradually started shuttling us through them, switching from checks to block color to pixelated waterfalls and Matrix-style image glitches. What was especially amazing about these garments was how (for want of a better word) fabric-y this fabric looked when not emitting a pattern.
This collection looked like a William Gibson prediction made real: The first actualization of self-patterning screen clothing that you could see having real-life application, or at least being enthusiastically used on stage. It also made you wonder how much the technology could develop in the next 20 years, perhaps to a point where the endlessly changeable textures and patterns it renders look much, much more like “real” fabrics than the brassily garish lights we saw today. More technologically advanced than anything else on the runway this season, but also evidently so rich in potential that you could see it being seen as primitive within a few years, this was a collection to give traditional textile manufacturers pause for thought. As PR Consulting’s Paris partner Nathalie Ours justly observed of Morinaga this afternoon, “He is the Courrèges of our time.”
