2 minutes
Doublet’s Paris Fashion Week show oozes charm and humour
When Japanese designer Masayuki Ino was awarded the LVMH Prize in 2018, he chose to encapsulate his fashion in three words: quirkiness, humour and comfort. A philosophy that he executed perfectly on the third day of the Paris Fashion Week Men’s.
In Rue du Vertbois, reminiscent of old-time Paris, the show by Ino’s label Doublet welcomed its guests to a make-believe Tokyo restaurant. The shop windows displayed traditional plastic Japanese food models, known as sampuru. After the advertising banners at the entrance, a gourmet corner sold Japanese sweets and plastic steak and chips dishes, “as kawaii [cute] as can be,” whispered the guests.
In the gallery, a series of giant burger and pizza sculptures fashioned out of lard, fictionally on sale at ridiculously high prices, were displayed as trophies - underlining Ino’s humorous approach - just before the entrance to the dining area. As the loudspeakers announced in Japanese and English that the show was about to start, Ino set the models rolling from dressing rooms made to look like kitchens.
The models came in all shapes, sizes, colours and ages, oozing attitude, character, comic-strip quirkiness and, above all, a joie de vivre that is Doublet's signature trait.
Setting the tone, the first model strolled in sporting a ramen bowl headgear, clad in an Oriental-style jacket-cum-apron, holding a pair of chopsticks. Then came a ginger-haired boy with a quiff and moustache, straight out of the 1980s Los Angeles gay scene, wearing a black denim jacket with oh-so-French, tongue-in-cheek croissant and pain au chocolat prints.
Ino seems to most enjoy exaggerating the details and the volume of his creations. His 1980s young girl manga remix was ultra-kitsch with an Eiffel Tower print, finding a new lease of life in streetwear mode. A smiling Japanese woman wearing a sailor-stripe sweater held an oversized leather tote bag made of a series of detachable elements. From kawaii to Hawaii, a boy wore a floral print outfit in another culture-clash moment, something in which Ino seems to excel.
Doublet’s wardrobe strummed plenty of inventive fashion riffs, blending cultures and genres, from a Diana Ross-style disco outfit mixed with Native American and baseball iconography, to a 1980s tie-dye look, and leather jackets with a punk vibe and Day-glo accents.
Ino described his collection as comfortable, as the highly wearable, trompe-l’œil overcoat in wrinkled leather made to look like a packaging carton showed.
The Japanese designer took his bow at the end of the show, holding a cooking pot and clad in a chef's apron.
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