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Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion.

Thirty years, several generations, one question about beauty.

Penta's note

How Penta reads Future Beauty

An exhibition of avant-garde Japanese fashion, made with an institute that collects Western dress. That detail says more than any introduction.

Penta notices that Future Beauty does not let Japanese fashion stand alone. It sets it inside a conversation. The Kyoto Costume Institute holds more than thirteen thousand pieces of Western clothing and accessories. Its director selected and retold thirty years in which Japanese designers answered back to that tradition. On one side, convention. On the other, a question turned against convention.

Scent, for Penta, is often read the same way: through familiar things seen from another angle. Hinoki is the wood of houses and baths, of things built to last. Hojicha is green tea passed through fire until it becomes something else. Both start as ordinary materials and are looked at again until they carry a new meaning.

In another essay Penta read an exhibition of Issey Miyake's work in Tokyo. At the Barbican, Miyake does not stand alone, but among his peers and those who came after.

The beauty of the future does not come from nowhere. It comes from a question put back to the past.

Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion at the Barbican: garments by Japanese designers in the galleries

A first in Europe

Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion ran at the Barbican Art Gallery in London from 15 October 2010 to 6 February 2011. The Barbican presented it as the first exhibition in Europe to survey avant-garde Japanese fashion comprehensively, from the early 1980s to that day.

It was organised by the Barbican Art Gallery and the Kyoto Costume Institute, and curated by Akiko Fukai, the institute's director. Wacoal was the main sponsor, with further support from Shiseido.

The Kyoto Costume Institute collects Western clothing, accessories and related documents; today its collection numbers more than thirteen thousand items. It is no accident that such an institute told the story of Japanese avant-garde fashion. To see what these designers changed, one has to know exactly what they stood before.

The Barbican set out the aim: to explore the particular sensibility of Japanese design and its idea of beauty as embodied in clothing.

Three pioneers, many successors

The list of designers opens with three names: Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto. According to the Barbican, Japanese designers like them redefined the very basis of fashion in the late twentieth century.

But the exhibition does not stop there. Then come Junya Watanabe, Jun Takahashi, Tao Kurihara. Then Kenzo Takada, Hiroki Ohya, ZUCCA, Kosuke Tsumura, Fumito Ganryu, Akira Naka, Taro Horiuchi, Mikio Sakabe. Then labels such as Matohu, mintdesigns, minä perhonen, Anrealage, Somarta, Né-Net and Sacai. Naoki Takizawa appears as designer for the house of Issey Miyake.

That last detail is worth a pause. A house continues after its founder hands the work to someone else. Fashion here is not the story of a few isolated geniuses but a current, with those who went first and those who follow.

Read from top to bottom, the list holds thirty years in one breath. Designers once seen as rule breakers became the ground on which the next generation asked its own questions.

Why call it future beauty

The title chooses beauty, not style or trend. It is a heavy word. It suggests these designers offered not just a new silhouette but a different idea of what deserves to be called beautiful.

Future is worth a thought too. By 2010, what Miyake, Kawakubo and Yamamoto began in the early 1980s was nearly thirty years old. Yet the exhibition still called it the future. Perhaps because the questions they raised about the body, about cloth, about the space between garment and person, were still open.

Such an exhibition also speaks about its audience. In London, European visitors were invited to look at their own fashion through the eyes of people from elsewhere. Convention suddenly seemed less natural.

What stays from Future Beauty, then, is not a particular outfit. It is the way the show makes the new visible: not by erasing the old, but by asking it questions it had never heard.

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