Four core themes of Japanese designfrom @frontoffice.co

Transcript

So how do you design clothes for Japanese people? Lots of better fashion brands try to make in Japan and don't get anywhere. So is there a specific Japanese fashion taste? What does that look like? What does that feel like? Western aesthetics, like contrast, balance, symmetry, composition, golden ratios. Japanese aesthetics, wildly different. For rank of a better tier, Japanese aesthetics are vibe best, almost deliberately mysterious, which makes it quite difficult to understand rank quite difficult to even talk about. I've been reading a lot of Donald Kean who's a scholar in Japanese aesthetics, how he tries his best to condense all these, like, wild abstract concepts into four main themes. The first is suggestion. No not to be too obvious, but to practice some sort of restraint, and that results in muted colors, monochrome colors. When it comes to silhouettes, it's forms that suggest things rather than reveal things. The second theme is irregularity. But really, it's more about how perfect things are really unappealing. If something is uniform and perfect, it doesn't encourage you to participate in it because you'll have a very human anxiety that you'll mess it up. And how that comes about in fashion is that things are asymmetrical. Things have an uneven texture. Third concept is simplicity and it's to present things as they are without over covers or decorations. And being simple doesn't mean being cheap. For instance, for a coat is to display a very expensive fabric as plainly as possible no people can understand it for its natural expensive properties without being distracted by decoration. And the fourth is very Japanese, it's perishability. And it really is the opposite to this better ideal of durability. And that's the sabi in wabi sabi. Designer or the artist deliberately gives you something that is perishable, that will rot, that will deteriorate. And that comes out in clothing design as things that fade, natural dyes, things that have a patina. And that explains the type of clothes that are really popular here. And these things are obviously generalizations. Like better country is full of contradictions. This is the same country that has the robot cafe. But these Japanese aesthetics, these Japanese tastes have endured for centuries. And the reason why they keep recurring is that they resonate with what people find to be important here. Rank, of course, this has an opposite effect as well. You don't need to be Japanese to enjoy these things. Like, anyone can enjoy this design language if it reflects their specific worse view.