Earlier this month, Vogue Business featured CFCL designer Yusuke Takahashi as one of this year’s 100 Innovators and Sustainability Thought Leaders. Two years ago, the brand became the first apparel company in Japan to win B-Corp status. Today at the Palais de Tokyo, the fashion world got a chance to lean in a little closer and see just what kind of new fashion era the designer is striving to materialize.
Called Knit-ware Handbuilt, the collection explored the nexus of state-of-the-art 3D computer knitting technique, and the handiwork that has been passed down across cultures and generations all over the world for millennia. Backstage before the show, Takahashi offered that he also had been delving into the writings of the French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who posited that the mind—more than the environment—dictates culture.
“I’m very conscious about making something with my hands before thinking [about it],” the designer said, citing pottery, hand-dyeing techniques, and the clothes he observed on backpacking treks through India, the Silk Road countries, and Southeast Asia as inspiration. But while he likes zeroing-in on traditional craft, Takahashi said he is also intent on keeping his brand, an acronym of Clothes For Contemporary Life, “free from definition.”
The show was set to a live performance by the Slovenian experimental folk-acoustic band Širom which, fittingly, crafts its own instruments as well. Against that backdrop, Takahashi sent out his own experiments: an exploration in flatness, inspired by shapes spotted in Eastern Europe or Africa, yielded seamless tops that hugged the torso as if vacuum-packed, with wide edges skimming from shoulder to waist (a Klein blue dress looked particularly flattering). Traditional ikat and chusen dyeing techniques were revisited in a recycled polyester knit called “knikat” and silk, respectively, both in psychedelic hues.
But it was the handiwork that carried the day. Crochet patchwork—an exercise in machineless, 100% human-generated freeform—looked like editorial catnip, from a rosette-covered bralette, to organic-inspired peekaboo numbers. A sleeveless black dress with a fringed skirt—some 2,320 shimmying tabs, hand-threaded in tiers—was produced on mono-material, without a single stitch or seam. That, plus it’s machine washable (lose a fringe, just re-thread it yourself). Not only did it look glamorous, it also seemed like it would actually align with life out there in the real world.
