Each season, ELLE collaborates with Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin to present one of the industry’s newest talents. This season, young Japanese designer WATARU TOMINAGA was selected, after winning the “Première Vision Grand Prix” at Hyères Festival.
After studying Applied Art in Textile at Tokyo’s Musashino Art University, Wataru Tominaga then moved to London to study Fashion Print at the prestigious Central Saint Martins. It is there that he developed the collection that got him the most significant reward from Hyères, which he then showed at the Mercedes-Benz tent in Berlin.
This award-winning collection looked at the differences between menswear and women’s wear and how to challenge them. A new kind of genderless fashion, Wataru Tominaga especially researched into colours, as he felt that men were not allowed the same kind of coloured variety as women. The designer hence mixed the primary colours red, blue and green, both by putting them together in tops, bottoms and socks, but also by including secondary colours such as yellow and orange. It all translated into an eclectic mix that demonstrated fashion could answer to other rules than that of gender, but also the designer’s playfulness.
Wataru noted that gender in fashion was not only applied to silhouettes and colours, but also to certain techniques such as pleats that are often linked to women’s wear. He thus combined pleats in all its forms – pleated cottons, pleating sewing techniques and fragmented paint-like coloured fabrics – with tailoring and binding techniques, typical to menswear fashion.
Finally, Tominaga studied the body – gender’s most obvious form – and how to change and deconstruct it, in order to push further the idea of genderless. He chose to do so by exaggerating some body parts, either with high oversized collars or with highly emphasized shoulders. This resulted in bold designs and a bit of craziness, which the designer recognized to value a bit.
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Wataru Tominaga, with this collection, proved himself to be a forward thinker, and significant to the fashion industry. By addressing social issues, such as the construction of gender, in a playful and crazy manner, the designer indicated how fashion could push boundaries. These designs were as bold as their designer’s mind.
Der Beitrag WATARU TOMINAGA | Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin S/S 2017 erschien zuerst auf SUPERIOR MAGAZINE.
