All the beautiful people
There are 24 hours in a day – and inventive Japanese designer Hidenori Kumakiri presents a look for each.
Acclaimed Japanese designer Hidenori Kumakiri was a pattern-maker for Comme des Garçons Homme for six years before he stepped out on his own with Beautiful People in 2007. He followed this with a flagship store in 2011 and proclaimed he was creating "kids' wear for adults" – with a children's trench coat, leather riding jacket and other pieces aimed at grown-ups. After success in Japan, where the brand sells in more than 70 stores, Beautiful People began presenting at Paris Fashion Week in 2017.
Every season, the designer finds beauty in the common ground between opposite ideas (such as kids/adults, male/female and front/back), all the while using exquisite fabrics and inventive garment construction.
For his spring/summer 2020 collection in Paris, Kumakiri worked with the theme of "24" – 24 hours in the day, 24 looks in the collection, a color palette that evolves through 24 gradients and even 24 ways to wear a piece. It played out like deconstruction meets reconstruction, creating a fluid, playful and reversible process in which the body has an endless dialogue with pieces that flip, twist and turn.
The designer took the 24-hours-in-a-day motif literally, showing sunrise and sunset prints, with fashions freeing and following the wearer from dusk until dawn on jersey dresses and pleated skirts. One dress came with three layers of mesh tulle with three holes, whose shape could be twisted asymmetrically by placing the body between one of the layers and one of the holes, adding further to the sense of transformation.
Fine-knit pieces created a literal air of transparency, with see-through cotton blazers, and a floaty feel pervaded much of the work, as though the dresses, tunics and tops were endlessly reworkable, thus allowing the wearer to be less wasteful. As the brand's tagline says on Instagram: "We can't always change the world, but we can choose how we see. Everything is beautiful."
