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Best foot forward
After sewing up the Tokyo streetwear scene, Yasuhiro Mihara
hooked up with Puma for an internationally coveted sneaker
line. Martin Webb talks shop with the trendsetting designer.
Yasuhiro Mihara has come a long way from his hometown in
Fukuoka. Dubbed the king of Tokyo street fashion by fans and
fashion experts alike, the 30-year-old head of the Mihara
Yasuhiro brand has his own boutique on Omotesando, a reputation
for the most extravagant shows in the Tokyo Collection, and
has just been the subject of a London exhibition. But it was
a tie-up two years ago with sporting goods brand Puma that
thrust Mihara into the international limelight.
"Puma's an international brand so it was definitely
the easiest way to get my name known overseas," says
the gently mannered designer of the collaborative sneaker
line. "Even if people in Europe have an interest in
Japan they can't get information about it. However
fast air travel gets, Japan is always going to be the Far
East. But working with Puma has been like a pipeline and it's
made it easier to get offers from overseas agents."
With his merchandise now stocked by some of world's
top boutiques, Mihara is basking in his hard-earned fame and
fortune. It has been a speedy ascent to stardom for a man
who started making shoes for friends while still in college.
After graduating from Tama Bijutsu Daigaku with a degree in
textiles, Mihara opened a small leather goods store on an
Aoyama backstreet in 1998. He started showing clothing on
the Tokyo Collection circuit in 1999 and produced his first
sneaker line for Puma three seasons ago. But despite becoming
an international fashion figure, Mihara won't be defecting
to European catwalks like some of his erstwhile Tokyo Collection
participants. "I'm a patriot," he declares.
"I'm proud of my nationality and I want to show
in Tokyo."
Show and tell
Mihara's latest extravaganza for the Autumn/Winter
2003/2004 collection was staged in an abandoned bowling alley
at the foot of Tokyo Tower. Four scaffolding towers were erected
beside the runway, each holding a man with a video camera
focused on one eyeball. Footage of the eyes was projected
live onto giant screens looming over the catwalk.
The theme was "non-policy," a term Mihara used
to express that he had designed the clothes without any restrictive,
all-encompassing concept. The result was a sublime lineup
in which the dressed-down designer honed his signature street
style to perfection, incorporating top trends like lustrous
fabrics and layering while adding flourishes through his leatherworking
expertise and talent for deconstruction. Parachute pants came
in astutely judged voluminous shapes, jeans in a mesmerizing
shade of blue, boots and shoes in his trademark battered leather
with toes curling up at just the right degree-all perfectly
engineered to suit the Tokyo streetwear market and, Mihara
hopes, foreign fashionistas as well.
"In the past there were lots of artistic creators who
weren't interested in commercial success, who thought
if they could just scrape by making their stuff that was enough,
but I think combining art and business is very important,"
says the son of an artist and a chicken researcher. Unusually
for a Japanese designer, Mihara has built his business around
leather goods and his brand's runaway success is credited
with kicking off the current craze for made-in-Japan footwear.
But the trendsetting designer is always trying to stay one
step ahead. "I've been drawing and making things
from an early age, and I always believed that one-offs were
best; a unique pair of shoes, a unique item of clothing-the
antithesis of mass production," he says. "So
I try to create things that can't be made by mass production,
that's why there are so many handmade features to my
work, and why it is so different to other stuff on the market.
I'm always trying to produce the un-producible."
Mihara is renowned for his cryptic philosophical musings and
quasi-political statements. Although he is a leather designer,
Mihara is keen to point out that he makes regular donations
to Greenpeace. His most recent show also had a subtle political
message with invitations that came in the form of a copy of
Newsweek magazine with details of the venue pasted over the
contents page. "If you look at the media, a lot of
information is very misleading, who knows what's true
and what's false? In many ways we're very helpless,
that's what concerns me at the moment," he says.
Mihara's love of the little people, the helpless and
the voiceless, is an essential part of both his personal ethic
and his design philosophy. "When I was in New York
recently, I definitely felt that everyone wanted to be a winner.
There, it seems that if you're not a winner you've
got no right to comment on anything," he says. "But
I like normal people."
"Fashion and creation always seems to be about fantasy…
Some designers might take inspiration from something like
a beautiful flower or Cleopatra. I take an old man who drinks
in the pub every night in the same worn-out, filthy old sweater,"
says Mihara, whose own aspirations are equally modest. "I
just want to keep creating until I die, that's my dream."
Photo
credit: Martin Webb (portrait), Courtesy of Mihara Yasuhiro
(runway)
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