One of this year’s LVMH Prize semi-finalists, Ryota Murakami is an endearingly awkward knitwear designer and one of Japan’s top emerging womenswear talents. For his collection this season, which he showed in a large hall in Tokyo’s Shinagawa district, he looked back on the decade since he launched his brand Pillings. “We paid close attention to techniques that we couldn’t master, the parts that we couldn’t express well, and things that we could have done better. We also wanted to update it, rather than just looking back,” he explained backstage. Most of the knits in the collection had been intentionally shrunken, which was partly an exercise in trusting the process. “It’s something that you can’t control, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out,” he said.
It turned out wonderfully weird. There were moth-eaten blankets that wrapped around the models’ bodies, crumpled cardigans with restrictively ruched arms, and knitted dresses that were almost fungal in the way they ruffled organically at the hems. In one look, a black knit was decorated with many zip-up pockets that had had their ivory cotton linings turned inside out, giving the impression that the garment was spilling out of itself, or of a teddy bear with its stuffing pulled out. Another gray dress sprouted a drawer’s worth of socks, transforming it into a pile of neglected laundry. Fair isle sweaters had extra long sleeves that fell to the side or had rumples that bubbled across the torso, while in others the knits seemed to be multiplying, sleeves and neck holes sprouting from the wool in a kind of knitwear mitosis. In a way it was extraordinarily visceral, the lumps and bumps of the shrunken and irregular knits gently reminiscent of that famous 1997 Comme des Garçons collection (though Pillings is not part of Rei Kawakubo’s brand stable, you imagine it would make an excellent fit).
Murakami had enlisted the help of contemporary dancer Un Yamada as a movement consultant, and the models held their skirts, their hands delicately placed on their thighs or, in one look, grasped together at the chest. Ghostly music filled the room as the models’ slow footsteps echoed on the wooden runway. The result was an accomplished collection that showed off both Murakami’s ingenious knitwear skills and his knack for layering his clothes with emotional depth. Here is a designer who can translate tenderness into clothing.
The sweater in the last look was supposed to resemble a castle, but the Pillings team couldn’t quite get it to work and it ended up looking more like a half-melted haunted house. Murakami saw the charm in it anyway. “I liked the distortion. I think that attitude of going towards something [but not always reaching it] is very important when making things,” he said. In the Pillings universe, the misshapen is beautiful, and herein lies the consummate magic of the brand. “I feel there’s a lot of value in naturalness, like lines that you can’t draw with your head or with a ruler, so I incorporated that into my creations,” said Murakami. “Rather than following the shape of the body, it’s more like the shape of the heart.”
