This season, Kozaburo Akasaka photographed his lookbook images in and around Canal Street on a cool—and it must be said, hot—cast of characters that includes both friends and people he admires. “Until now I’ve been kind of focusing on the visual representation and styling as things that are more out of this world,” he explained during an appointment at a friend’s studio that he had temporarily taken over. That’s the friend wearing the Hex sashiko “denim”-style jacket and matching pleated trousers in the first look. “But I see my friends wearing the clothes, so I kind of wanted to capture this moment in New York.”
As it turns out, grounding his clothes in real life served to elevate their desirability—in the designer’s meticulous creative process it can sometimes get lost that he makes clothes to be lived-in, not to be saved for precious special occasions. Take the aforementioned honeycomb Sashiko group, which is available in four different colors, each achieved through a different natural hand-dyeing process in his native Japan. Whipping out an iPad full of videos of the dyeing in-progress, he explained the painstaking steps through which the colors are achieved. “It’s funny because I’m from Japan, but as I go out of the country I learn more about our history—I didn’t know that we had a rich history in botanical dyeing colors. It was also part of kimono culture, which is in decline; the amount of craftsmen now is 3% of what it used to be in its heyday.”
It does not make for inexpensive clothing, that’s for sure, but there’s a clear one-to-one relationship between its process and the final product. Supporting a centuries-old tradition with silhouettes that are timeless but never boring is also a kind of sustainability approach. “Some people say this material is quite heavy for spring, but for me it’s more about its longevity,” he added. Elsewhere there were lightweight cottons, a similarly lightweight cardigan knitted to resemble snake scales, and, of course, Kozaburo’s signature denim separates. A Western shirt with a leather trim was an absolute highlight.
