“I’m not good at being feminine,” said Kanako Sakai at her fall show. At her second runway outing after a strong debut last season, the designer spoke about never quite gelling with her gender (or at least society’s expectations of it), and this season served as an exploration of those difficult feelings.
Sakai said she’d been reading about Marilyn Monroe’s bullet bra, and then saw Kim Kardashian’s push-up Nipple bra released late last year for her shapewear brand Skims. The designer spoke about how each woman was regarded as a sex icon, and her wonder at how Kardashian has intentionally wielded her sexuality as a selling point. “I’m the exact opposite! I avoid wearing feminine clothes and just cover myself up with jackets and stuff, and I found it fascinating that these other women existed in this way,” she said.
It led Sakai to pick up a copy of A History of the Breast by the feminist historian Marilyn Yalom to learn more (“despite being a woman’s possession, the breast always seems to belong to someone else”). She also referenced Yayoi Kusama’s attempt to overcome her fear of sex by making hundreds and hundreds of phalluses (see her work Accumulations for a good example). “When I thought about that, I realized that I shouldn’t just shy away from the things that I don’t like, but face up to them,” she said. And so she leaned into her discomfort, creating Madonna-esque cone bras, nipple-baring sheer tops, and chaps with heart-shaped cut-outs in the crotch.
By themselves, each piece looked incredibly well-made. Sakai’s forte is innovative textiles that she combines with a great eye for color, and she continued to impress on that front. The red furry dress that closed the show was actually made out of silk, and the coat in look 15 utilized a dyeing process from a factory in Kyoto that involved heating sulfur with real silver to create that beautiful metallic effect.
Taken as a whole, however, it wasn’t always clear what kind of story the collection was telling, and Sakai’s fascinating theme got a bit lost. Printed on her own T-shirt as she came out at the end (and on some of the looks) was the Walt Whitman quote “I am large, I contain multitudes,” which Sakai loves because it was often adopted by Patti Smith, an icon of hers. It’s clear why she relates, and Sakai herself clearly does contain multitudes. Her challenge going forwards is to learn how to wrangle them.
