Japan rendez-vous with beautiful people in Saint Germain

Silk obis and the Japanese platforms, tamato sleeves and the wataboshi wedding veil: they all were transformed over night in the most desirable pieces for a stroll on Saint Germain streets. Yep, it is possible, said the designer of beautiful people brand (www.beautiful-people.jp), Hidenori Kumakiri. And I just loved it.

Find the beautiful clothes from beautiful people on www.beautiful-people.jp. 
Beautiful people designer, Hidenori Kumakiri’s background in menswear tailoring at Comme des Garçons Homme dictates the DNA of the brand. @beautifulpeople_officialsite.

In a beautiful interior of Éléphant Paname Art Center, in cold light of a Parisian morning, I really didn’t know what to capture first on my Instagram stories. The cool exhibition on the walls (with the traditional clothes hangers for the oversized pieces from Japanese culture, the obis and the tamato sleeves), the psychedelic music, the gigantic earrings in shape of a pearl hanging on model’s year or the perfect cut of the Japanese school children’s randoseru backpacks, suitable now for a walk on big boulevards.

The beautiful people collection for Fall/Winter 2017/2018 (at their first appearance at Paris Fashion Week) catches the duality of cultures – the blurring of international borders and eras morph into design details that bizarrely fuse Wa (traditional Japanese clothing) and Yo (western clothing) creating a culture clash of conflicting colours and references that are both cosplay and cosmopolitan. “For beautiful people’s Parisian debut, designer Hidenori Kumakiri has invited street style monsters from Tokyo to walk down the Boulevard Saint Germain, picking up cues from the effortlessly chic Rive Gauche BCBG.”

For beautiful people, classicism is always warped with a monster lurking somewhere in the shadows. To shine a light on these shadows, most pieces are reversible and double faced; and styling is layered to emphasize the contrast, with plays on proportion amplifying the impact.

A Wafuku trench. Tamoto sleeves. Traditional obis are replaced by layers of belts in leather, python, and fabric. The round silhouette of a wataboshi – a Japanese wedding veil – gets a strange twist. Japanese school children’s randoseru backpacks serve as inspiration for the accessories. Oiran, or elite escorts from the Edo era, are transported to the Jardin du Luxembourg – French camellia hair pieces by Alexandre de Paris, grotesquely oversized in acetate, affixed to their heads. A psychedelic 1960s Liberty print by William Morris is augmented to creepily large proportions, and echos of floral Wafuku patterns whisper inside a floor length denim Oiran skirt.

A Japan that doesn’t exist. A fetishized Frenchness. Past by way of the future. beautiful people transported to a final destination – habits japonais.

Beautiful people (www.beautiful-people.jp) designer, Hidenori Kumakiri’s background in menswear tailoring at Comme des Garçons Homme dictates the DNA of the brand. @beautifulpeople_officialsite.

Photography: Ola Rindal. Styling: Camille Bidault-Waddington

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