If putting an outfit together has you in a tizzy, rest easy.
“Anyone can dress up by wearing Sacai’s one-piece [garments],” designer Chitose Abe told editors through a translator after her spring show.
That’s what Abe’s astutely constructed trompe-l’oeil garments are all about: style — minus intricate styling.
Backstage, Abe said her throughline of the season was elegance and how to tease that from classics, which she did by packing all manners of ruffles, stiff or soft.
Of course, after 25 years, the basics here are her hybridized silhouettes rather than the masculine tailoring, MA-1 bomber jackets and other staples that she’d started with.
Elsewhere, it was the utilitarian shapes themselves she used as ruffles. Case in point: a military parka was split in two and peeled off the shoulders into a dramatic cold-shoulder dress.
Fresh iterations included a Breton-style top turned into a minidress; a dress with ruffles constructed from the shoulders of a trench coat, and a boiler suit turned sexy with strategically placed panels.
Along with the palette of black, utilitarian neutrals and white, with a splash of plaid and big-cat print for good measure, telegraphed a dressy Parisian je-ne-sais-quoi that felt on point, given the brand has just opened a four-story showroom in the French capital.
There were intricate looks that were legible only to Sacai devotees.
Still, their construction was crafty and spoke of Abe’s considerable ingenuity in construction, another baseline that she’s kept going for a quarter of a century.
