It’s bright and early on a cloudy autumn morning in Tokyo, and up on the seventh floor of Comme Des Garçons’ HQ building is the dark room where Tao Kurihara has taken to showing her collections. Tao’s rustic, folksy vibe sets her apart as the earthiest designer in the Comme stable, and her clothes are the most unabashedly girlish (perhaps with the exception of the Comme des Garçons Girl line). But where the CDG Girl is prim and proper, showing up to class on time with her neatly pressed Peter Pan collar shirts and schoolgirl skirts, Tao’s damsel has run away with the fairies to go and live in the woods.
That idiosyncratic sense of whimsy felt particularly potent in this collection, which was inspired by Tove Jansson—the Finnish artist and author best known as the creator of The Moomins. Unsurprisingly, The Moomins are big in Japan (a quick look on the website shows more Moomin stores in Japan than anywhere else in the world), and 2024 marks 80 years since Jansson first brought them into the world. If that sounds like foreshadowing for a collab collection of thinly veiled Moomin-merch, you don’t know Tao.
“I created this collection hoping that by printing Jansson’s wonderful and powerful drawings onto fabric and wearing them, I could generate new ideas,” read the show notes. While a lesser designer might have plastered the characters verbatim onto the clothes, Kurihara went deep into Jansson’s lore, transforming the artist’s self portraits (ciggie in mouth) into giant polka dots and harlequin prints on vividly bright dirndl skirts—and, though not seen on the runway, printed the flop-nosed character Snork, an early Moomin prototype, onto T-shirts and totes. The colors, too, sometimes recalled the foresty, organic tones of Jansson’s work, with Finnish landscapes and meadowy floral prints appearing on cotton dresses, often warped and spliced with ruches of tulle so that they pouf out into that bottom-heavy, unmistakably Comme silhouette.
Later came a smattering of white looks, enlivened as usual with broderie anglaise and asymmetrical ruffles, followed by gray tailored jackets which became progressively more mangled (but beautifully so) with ruching that swept across the shoulders and chest. The final looks were rich layers of stormy-colored tulle and sheer metallic fabric, again printed with Jansson’s smoking vignette. It was as unique an interpretation of Moominvalley as could be hoped for, and showed Kurihara’s knack for deftly moulding her inspirations into the Comme universe.
Kurihara is clearly from the Rei Kawakubo school of design, down to the way she talks about “generating new ideas” through the dissonance of knocking things together. She joined the business in 1997 only a year after graduating from Saint Martins, and out of all the designers in the Comme family seems most close to its matriarch in taste and sensibility—as well as with her ability for making the artsy and whimsical feel commercially viable. Still, it would be interesting to see Tao color further outside of the lines that Kawakubo has written. To quote Kurihara herself on the reason she was inspired by Jansson: “She lived her life without forgetting her own independence and freedom.” Words to live by.
