Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Poetry • Summer 2015
**Preparation ritual:** *You must atlas the vessel before burial. Sweeten*
*the thread that joins*
*the feet to the throat. From the groundwater in the uncontacted soil, draw out tasteless precious metal*
*that slides through your hands*
blessed Anthony I’m talking to you because I’ve bent myself like this before. And because there is
something sleeping in my throat,
a warmth growing
*like butter. Invite this glowing substance into your blood. Let it eat*
*the unlocking muscles, not so different from plant fiber. Let it fill*
*the chips and ridges and reach the cool center*
When I smoke, Anthony, feel it stir.
When I speak, feel it curl
*of the bone. Braid your hands into the reeds around you *
The something burrowing in my blood? His back
lit through the window.
Anthony let me forget let me not
call his name in the grocery store.
*A river will blink back at you. Let that be action too. The river will*
*replace the ribs.* Let me forget the ridges
of his first teeth. *Watch the pitted sand*
*remove itself*
*from the creases of your palms.*
It’s raining and our hands are backboned together over the gearshift at a stoplight. It’s
raining on TV and I’m still waiting. I’m waiting and the weather is failing to comply.
Anthony, I’m pushed right up against my skin.
*Kiss the wrists, thick*
*with mud and oil.* Look,
the repeated image of a consecrated body.
*Look, Anthony,*
there is nothing left to consecrate.
Features • Winter 2012
On the ground rests a slip of paper worth $96. A janitor, mop and cigarette in one hand, kneels down and studies the fine print. CALDER LEG 1: 4, 6, 7; LEG 2: 3.
He stops there. He mops on, smokes on, looks on. Later he returns with a dustpan and wipes up the trash under Seabiscuit’s 1937 MassCap banner.
Outside, the oval is kept well enough, dragged through and through with a six a.m. tractor and a six a.m. man. The enclosing fence defines pristine as white. In the infield lurks a fountain in its off-season.
At the nearest betting window, a sign hangs reading “CLOSED.” In the window next to it, a sign reading “CLOSED.” A third window missing its sign is closed.
On the wall hangs a painting of a horse standing on a patch of grass. There is no one on the horse, but the length of the grass patch in front of the horse is equal to the length of the grass patch behind the horse. Behind the painting of the horse is a mural of another horse. There is a man on the horse in the mural, but the painting is on that man.
A square machine in a hole in the wall prints a slip of paper worth $24. It falls into the hand of a man with a custom-made coat made for someone else in someone else’s era. It will learn if it deserves the ground.
The man limps out to the track and squints at the finish line. No one has crossed it in three months. Not a single loser. He limps back inside.
Twelve TV’s in two rows of six flash odds, pools and payouts. POST TIME blinks on the set simulcasting live from Aqueduct. The horses approach the starting gate resolute and in low-definition.
A cluster forms. All heads turn up, all eyes take in the screen a few feet under heaven. “I know a guy,” the man says. No one mutters an answer. “I know a guy who had a dream about the number five. So he woke up at five and took the fifth train out of the station. There were five people in his car. He shows up at the track, and in the fifth race puts five grand on the five.”
The race goes off.
“Horse finishes fifth.”
2:03:20 later, the race ends. The $24 slip of paper lazily finds the ground, worth nothing.
The man heads for the machine in the hole in the wall. It does not smell like horses.
Fiction • Commencement 2011
Something is floating in the pool, the Missus realizes on Tuesday, as she sips the coffee Concepción always brews for her when she starts work. (Fresh coffee is not worth the shame of having to ask for it brewed around noon.) She can’t make out the shape from the kitchen window, but a quick inspection reveals it to be a dead fawn, lying on its side, its front hooves idly playing in the jet of a water filter. “It would be good if they could pick it up before my husband comes home,” she tells Concepción. But when Concepción calls Animal Control, the rude voice that answers, put off by an accent she can’t identify, tells her to call back in the afternoon when a Spanish-speaking operator will be on duty, and so Concepción decides to wash every single one of his shirts instead and leaves the deer in the capable hands of God.
She winds her way through the big house, kneeling periodically to gather clothes strewn in the hallways and across the floors of rooms. Seen from above, her little figure could be that of a penitent monk as he winds his way through a cloister, stopping periodically to touch the ground and mumble a few words of self-abnegation. It’s difficult to keep track of what she has and hasn’t done, in this house. There are so many rooms, and when the husband isn’t home—which is most weekdays and even some weekends at this point—the Missus somehow manages to spread her waking and sleeping hours, her dressing, eating, and undressing, evenly throughout the rooms, so that no room is ever unused. Concepción doubts she’d get a reprimand if she missed one. But her conscience won’t permit her to be like her friend Gloria, who sometimes runs the same load of laundry three times to look busy, and spends most of her workday standing in the kitchen watching soap operas and adding hot water to the cubes of instant mocha that she brings from home.
Each room is very, very elaborately decorated, but Concepción, with her girlhood spent in QuezÓn, can’t see a meaningful difference between the Baroque Revival moldings in the third guest bedroom and the rococo panelling in the ground-floor study. She does have a special fondness for the delicate curves in the gleaming wallpaper of the Art Nouveau room, although she couldn’t tell you why. Today there is a mess in what she doesn’t know is the Victorian room. The sheets on the wrought-iron Murphy bed are in disarray, and a bottle of Pastek that had been sitting open on the floor has been overturned. The whitish, viscous substance oozes across the floor in a two-foot-long slick.
Only a professional-grade solvent, or paint thinner, will remove the Pastek from the floor, but Concepción can’t drive and doesn’t want to walk to the hardware store in the midday heat. Still, feeling compelled to do something, she fills a bucket with wood soap and water and scrubs meditatively at the stain for the next hour. She knows her efforts will not be rewarded; this is not the first time she’s had to clean up a spilled bottle of this paste. The new wallpaper—an ugly paper, she thinks, imported from a heritage manufacturer in Britain, printed with big fat cabbage roses spilling across a pink and green background—still smells like the store-room and the packages it was shipped in. The shadows of branches and the early afternoon light play across it, and out the window Concepción can see the Missus sitting by the pool, staring out across the lawn and drinking something out of her coffee mug with a straw, while the deer bobs gently in the pool next to her.
Although Concepción is paid a good bit more than Gloria, and probably much more than the other women in her carpool, she sometimes daydreams about leaving this job because the house is so lonely during the day. Other women have houses with children, sometimes little children who don’t go to school yet and need to be fed and bathed. She has a green card, is young and pretty, and could probably find other work. She might even be able to marry an American. The reason she stays is something obscure relating to the Missus. There is something about her mania for decorating that makes Concepción uneasy, and she wonders if the poor woman can’t have children.
If Concepción had the consciousness to ask the right questions, she might also ask why her employer isn’t working, despite a prestigious Ph.D. that hangs on the wall of the third-floor study next to an equally prestigious B.A. When the Missus is in a black mood, she likes to berate herself by telling herself she’s lazy. (She esteems herself too highly to call herself stupid.) The half-written manuscript of her first and last monograph has been locked in her 19th-century Shaker writing desk since she bought it online six months ago. When she isn’t torturing herself by thinking up possible extensions of the book’s argument—which are always of ambiguous value and which she therefore never makes—she puts her art history background to use. She has planned the interior décor of her house, sourced materials from American and European antique dealers, rearranged and altered furniture, and generally wasted time. She realizes sometimes, with a laugh, that she is worse than one of the future wives she used to make fun of in college.
One came to her senior tutorial and announced, “My boyfriend and I are engaged. We leave for Paris on Friday.” Another, who used to wear her right ring finger the largest emerald the Missus has ever seen on, never spoke but always spent the whole two hours braiding and rebraiding her long golden hair. On warm days these long-legged beauties spilled across the portico and steps of the department’s Italianate building, swapping sticks of gum, painting their nails, and sunning themselves. The professors were grumpy old men with hair coming out of their ears. She wrote a thesis subtly insinuating that one of the most prominent of them was sexist and racist and was awarded *summa cum laude*. When she went to New York for her Ph.D., she fell in love with a very tall and broad-shouldered young associate who swore and talked very loudly and had a habit in conversation of slapping nearby surfaces for emphasis. They saw each other on weekends and went for walks in Prospect Park and then to the bar next to her building to get drunk. In her second year, after each was deeply in the other’s confidence, he told her that he had been seeing a dancer—a man—behind his wife’s back, and that, in celebration of their first anniversary, they were going to look at summer shares in Montauk together. When, six months later, she told him she was suspending her studies to marry and move to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., he asked her to explain herself. When she wouldn’t, he got angry and called her a mercenary. You think you’re so fucking clever, he told her, but if you leave one day you’ll find yourself knee-deep in shitty diapers and you’ll be so deeply fucked that you’ll wish you were dead. She called him a coward, a fag, and a misogynist loud enough for the people in the adjacent offices to hear her.
Their friendship—probably the deepest she has ever had—was an unfortunate mistake and she doesn’t like to think about it. Most days, while she sits by the pool drinking her coffee, she remembers all of the tricks (intellectual and social) that she learned in her six years in higher education. She thinks about the apartment she shared with three other female grad students, all of whom were starved for sexual attention and coped with it by dieting perpetually, denying themselves food so they could forget they were being denied the other thing. She used to pick up men sometimes at the bar next to her building and take them to her room. When they came to the next day they would see the shelves full of books with names like *Representation and Suppression *and* WHO SPEAKS?* and the nude photographs of local women—found at her neighborhood flea market—that she had pasted above her bed. More than one of them pulled up his pants and snuck out of the room as quietly as he could. She would have a good laugh later recounting her night to the roommates, who were always nonplussed by the vulgarity she employed but secretly fiercely jealous and also a little cranky from hunger.
Concepción is more or less the only woman she has had regular contact with in her two years since moving to Potomac. The Missus likes to tease her by asking her about her men, and Concepción evades her by blushing and acting as if she doesn’t completely understand the question, even though the Missus knows she didn’t use an interpreter when she was interviewing for her green card and has been picked up several times in the afternoon by a boy in a pickup truck.
Later that summer, when Concepción visits her family in the Philippines, she will be kidnapped along with an aunt when they are walking in the street in Lucena City. The kidnappers are three day laborers, one of whom has a pregnant wife and one of whom wants to replace his Geo van (where they will be held until nightfall) with a flashy yellow sports car. As the kidnappers hustle them down to the humid basement where they will pass the final 36 hours of their captivity, Concepción slips on the stairs and loses the baby she has been carrying for the past ten weeks. She won’t have known she is pregnant, and as a small trickle of blood collects at the hem of her skirt, she will only fret for herself and for the green silk dress she has borrowed from the Missus without asking. After her extended family has scraped together the money for the ransom and the kidnappers have delivered her back to the two-story cinderblock building where they live, she will tear the rich garment to shreds in a fit of anger, supposing it the reason that the kidnappers plucked her and her aunt off the street.
Was it the pills she is using? They’re an herbal fertility aid that you can find in drugstores in the Philippines. The married women in her family have taken them for decades. Before that, they would make a tea from the same plants. Concepción isn’t married, at least not yet, but she would like to have a baby. Some mornings, when she’s the only one awake in the house, and she looks out the kitchen window to see the lawn with its pool so empty, and there isn’t a sound to be heard and no one who could possibly observe her, she crushes up one of these pills to slip into the Missus’s morning coffee, where it dissolves over the hours, its peculiar herbal bitterness dissolving into the bitterness of the coffee, and by the time the Missus finally rouses herself and comes down to the kitchen, she could not possibly suspect that the mug she holds contains a sweet loam, a sprinkling of tropical soil.
On Tuesday night, Concepción dreams that she is sitting cross-legged in a field as the fawn decomposes in her lap. When she comes to work the next morning, it is gone. The Missus has brewed her own coffee. There’s a mess of grounds scattered across the countertop, but Concepción feels obscurely proud of her anyway. She puts some pretzels on a plate, and cuts up some nice cheese to go with it, and brings it down to the pool, where the Missus reclines in a deck chair in her pink robe and sunglasses reading *Architectural Digest*.
“Good morning, mam. Did the town come and pick it up?”
“I called Animal Control first thing in the morning,” says the Missus.
“I’m sorry, mam. I called them yesterday when it happened!”
“Oh, they had a record of your call,” says the Missus. “You have nothing to apologize for—they were rude to you. Someone will be calling for you around 11, go ahead and pick up the phone yourself.”
“Thank you, mam! I brought you some food, mam. It’s early. You never eat breakfast because you always wake up at lunch time!” In Concepción’s warm throat there is a rising feeling of devotion to this funny woman-child who treats the work of making her home like a game but always looks so horribly sad.
While she is waiting, she sees the Missus take off her sunglasses and then stand up and slide off her bathrobe. She is wearing a floppy pink bikini that can barely cover the jiggling of her firm little breasts. A deep voice calls her name. She squints up at the third floor of the house and waves slowly, broadly, as if she’s waving at a passenger on the deck of a departing ship.
Later that night, when the Missus searches frantically in the chest of drawers in her bathroom for the diaphragm that her husband doesn’t know she wears, it will be rattling around the floor of Gloria’s car in its pink plastic case. They are coming back from a dance in Virgina along MacArthur Boulevard in Gloria’s RAV4. Concepción reclines against the floral neoprene seat cover and watches the passing day laborers fish in the polluted waters of the Potomac. They do it at night with flashlights so the police won’t see them.
The diaphragm is wet and floppy like a rubber jellyfish, and this makes her think of an old fertility ritual that her grandmother once explained to her. When they get to the Chain Bridge she tells Gloria to pull over. They get out of the car and walk partway across the bridge. “What’s that?” Gloria asks. Concepción opens the pink case to show her the glistening dome. “It’s a giant condom!”
“It’s for women, you put it into your vagina and it seals it up so the sperm can’t get in.”
Gloria makes a vulgar joke and they laugh. “Where did you get it?”
A secret smile spreads across Concepción’s face and she doesn’t answer Gloria’s question. Instead she hurls the diaphragm, case and all, into the river. It bobs on the surface for a moment, propelled by the surf hitting its concavity, and is swept downstream onto the waiting hooks of the fishermen.
Poetry • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
The same thing that makes a rat a rat and not a knotweed,
scampering across the third rail at Downtown Crossing.
He is after a half-eaten BLT that somebody has flung
between the tracks. And one of his front teeth is chipped
and he is winning. The thing that makes a knotweed
spread its thighs out west until its veins can supply a body,
then another. What makes a horse a horse if not
the gleeful declaration of such from the seventh train window
that day? There can only be so many poems about
staring Barrels down. A country only being a country at gunpoint
or between the coal-laden tracks of work boots. Instead:
a country is a country because I say so. Because I hold your hand
while waiting for the train and when you reach for my waist
I can think myself a rat stumbling upon a rare feast.
Because when we leave the station the snow will be gray
and falling in lazy circles from the low-hung clouds
like the ash that follows some great fire—
but still, I know we’ll stick our tongues out to catch the flakes
like the small things we are.
Poetry • Commencement 2011
In the ninth year,
a high, bright room
received the secret wheel.
Outside, near the sky,
a tangle of trees,
the sound of sea.
The spinster,
her hands showing
wet, bloody with light,
shuddered.
Beneath her weight,
the stool was still.
She dressed the distaff,
hairs hanging off
like cornsilk, unspun—
a pale, worsted pistil,
which she twisted
into tufts
of fiber, pinned
to the spindle: speed
made a swatch
of her fingers,
braided, unbraided—
almost touching
the warming thread.
Being lulled,
I looked below
to her naked feet:
to where they beat
time against the treadle—
patter-pattern
without sound.
The wooden machine
sloughed off the skein.
I bore it to the basin:
crushed cochineal,
incarnadine.
Dripping, it dried,
caked with color
like bloodcrust in hair—
I evened the line.
Slowly the twine
whispered and wound:
a sphere.
In this way
I gave you
a light burden
to carry unclothed
into the tunnel—
you will want
to find your way back.
Features • Fall 2008
I was eighteen the time I wore an ISSEY MIYAKE dress, and it immediately struck me: there was too much fabric. The sleeves were three times the length of my arms—the neck, intended for a giraffe. It fit me like a glove, but it flowed past the floor, pooling around my feet. But procuring some scissors, the shop girls explained: “Make of it what you want.” They pointed to some lines deftly hidden in the fabric. “There are many options.” And just like that, the consumer becomes the creator and the boutique becomes a personal workshop.
An inversion of the consumer-creator relationship and a reconsideration of the place of technology and engineering in fashion design, the dress was a product of the now famous collaboration between Issey Miyake and Dai Fujiwara.
Viewed today as the Godfather of Japanese fashion, Miyake already had world renowned for his groundbreaking designs. Miyake created the ISSEY MIYAKE design studio in 1970, and spent the following decades challenging the conventional shapes and European traditions of high fashion. Miyake demonstrated particular interest in the intersection of fashion and technology, most notably with his launch of his Pleats Please line in 1993. A production technique that uses a special heat press technique to infuse simple, colorful fabrics with shape and texture, the results are light yet defined, free-flowing yet highly constructed. Further, the polyester clothing requires minimal sewing and corresponds with Miyake’s mission for beauty and function in innovative form.A-POC, which stands for “a piece of clothing,” and rhymes with “epoch,” is the latest technologically-driven line from the Mikaye-Fujiwara collaboration. , Fujiwara and Miyahi’’s collaboration, and their technologically inspired designs and production lines, respond to timeless a question for the fashion world: the delicate balance between high art and a commercial success.
Fashion has always toed a fine line between its dual identitiest’;it is pulled towards the two poles of ready-to-wear street clothes and haute couture. For many designers, the answer comes through the creation of two lines. Designers will show their hand-made high fashion on the runways of Paris and Milan, and spread their names with special, factory-produced collections for lower-end merchandisers. Yohji Yamamoto partnered with Addidas, John Varvatos with Converse, Isaac Mizrahi with Target. These partnerships allow a designer to meet the demands of a more consumer-minded business as well as maintain the freedom of high fashion expression.
The answer for Miyake and Fujiwara, however, came not from the production of two lines, but from use of a new means of production. Merging computer technology with the creativity of the consumer, the design duo founded A-POC—“A Piece of Cloth,” and rhyming with ““epoch.”” A revolutionary design technique, A-POC transforms a single thread into clothing sans coudre. The designer develops a pattern program, funnels a single thread into the knitting machine and presto—out comes a tubular piece of cloth, size and shape dependent on its intended use. Sewing is superfluous. Reliance on sweatshops disappears, as do long hours of hand sewing in Parisian ateliers. In a way, then, A-POC piggy-backed on the work of Miyake’s earlier work, using technology to bring new vigor and innovation to the fashion industry.
Yet despite the use of machine production, A-POC defies the tedium of the mass, factory-produced clothes. It is the consumer who adds the final artistic element, who becomes the final designer. Cutting along faint lines embedded in the production of the cloth, the customer chooses sleeve length, garment length, neck style and more—transforming a long tubular creation into a functional piece of clothing. With a pair of scissors, then, mass produced clothing becomes a custom-made dream.
The power of this form-function solution brought the duo much acclaim, and shifted Fujiwara’s career notably from the textile engineer to the fashion designer. In 2006, Fujiwara became the Creative Director for ISSEY MIYAKE, Miyake himself moving on to new pursuits, and in this role, he has continued the MIYAKE tradition of fusing technology and fashion. Preferring to focus on the new, the original, Fujiwara rarely takes inspiration from the past. His shows are never send-backs to the 1920s flappers nor an homage to Versailles circa Louis XIV. He emphasizes what is new, different, and possible in the modern age. His philosophy is simple: “I do not believe that any discussion of art is possible without bringing technology onboard.”
And even in his most recent work focused on nature, Fujiwara has maintained this dependence on the mechanical and the industrial. Exploring the ways in which technology mimics, preserves, even enables the natural, he illuminates the connection he sees between the typically opposing forces. Last month in Paris he showed “Color Hunting.” In preparation for this show—the Spring 2009 collection—Fujiwara took over 3,000 color swatches to the Amazon Rainforest, aiming to capture the exact, quintessential shades of the jungle. For Summer 2008, Fujiwara was captivated by all things Wind. “To observe the wind is to be aware of nature, to think about the flow of air that envelopes us and the environment in which we exist,” the ISSEY MIYAKE Team explained. The collection thus included clothes unconventionally intended not to protect a person from the elements, but to enhance a person’s interaction with their surroundings.
For both collections, technology was the bridge to the successful partnership between fashion and nature. For “Color Hunting,” Fujiwara identified the natural hues he desired—creating some clothes to achieve the natural element—but he also experimented with the transformation of these colors in the urban landscape, capturing the effect a glass prism or metallic reflection create. To truly create the effect of Wind, Fujiwara partnered with Dyson—the high-tech British vacuum producers. Together the duo built an enormous cyclone to simulate the many forms of wind—mechanically engineering the very natural environment he hopes his clothes will enhance.
For some designers, their fashion shows seem an opportunity to shock and stun. Twice a year, the runway creates an opportunity to smile smugly and say, “Oh yes, I dared.” We love them for it. We love John Galiano for filling Parisian Vogue with models garbed as pirates. We love Marc Jacobs for throwing Grunge-wear in the face of New York’s most fashionable elite. Their dedication to the fabulous—even the absurd—is captivating. It frees us from the daily convention of what one wears.
But what’s interesting about ISSEY MIYAKE is that despite the utter originality of his work, Fujiwara is far from smug. He intends neither to shock, nor stun. Instead, he is eerily nonchalant about his originality, matter of fact, even. Whether by recreating the natural through the mechanical or by creating an entire evening gown from a single thread, Fujiwara will defy every fashion convention in existence all while suggesting that the convention never existed. He makes his innovation seem apparent—obvious creations the circumstance. His models add to this effect. Awash in perfectly engineered color-hues and surrounded by yards of free-flowing, crafted cloth, they seem entitled to the ingenuities enabled by modern engineering.
In conjunction with his participation with Harvard’s Project East fashion show, Fujiwara spoke with The Advocate, and he spent considerable time discussing the place for innovation. His design philosophy helps explain the aura of nonchalance: “Nothing, whether it is new media or emerging circumstances or matters, ever springs into existence suddenly or from nothing,” Fujiwara explains. New thinking and new designs come from precise situations that demand solutions. In a complex society of evolving desires and circumstances, innovative design is but a necessary reaction—a simple, inescapable reality.
***
Harvard Advocate: Issey Miyake is famous for his integration of design, technology, engineering and fashion, and you clearly greatly influenced this practice. Can you describe the relationship you see between fashion, technology, and directed research? Why is this important in fashion, and how do you imagine it will influence the future of design? How or does the relationship with technology morph fashion from the world of art into the world of science?
Dai Fujiwara: During the latter half of my research aimed at creating the A-POC brand, I came to embrace a vague image in my mind. Using the flow of a river as a metaphor, apparel is located in the downstream sector of the textile industry infrastructure. Apparel designers must wait for the items produced upstream and there is no great need to worry about how materials used in fashion are made. This approach and thinking had become fixed in the industry, and I was beginning to grow fed up with it.
Computers offer the convenience of guaranteed information operation, with costs remaining low [as well as] the ability to turn out highly adaptable items despite being created through automated mass production. I did not see much evolution in production lines controlled by machines, or in the production methods that required human hands.
Thus, just as I came to the conclusion that production lines not controlled by machines and production methods not requiring human hands were in fact necessary for fashion, I felt that the conventional image of the river had become hackneyed. Much like fish swim from habitats in vast ocean realms to congregate in plankton generated at the boundary line between warm and cold currents, new visions are being drafted and implemented in the midst of capitalist society – the scene of complex interactions between money, people, commodities and now the Net society.
Naturally, it is impossible to discuss fashion outside the realm of clothing, it is also true that it is no longer feasible to ponder fashion solely in terms of clothing. When, at crucial turning points, new information, new commodities, new images and new characters emerge, people will demand those new elements, along with other information, things and images. I believe that creating methods to initiate these new flows is extremely important. I also feel that proposing such changes from the viewpoint of fashion is an effective means of corroborating the performance of potential catalysts. Within my work at present, I strive to fully embrace these concepts.
It is difficult for individuals to generate turning points. However, it may be possible to bring about new movements by joining with different partners or consolidating different categories. If the time can be found to unravel circumstances or situations already in existence, and then find compatible partners to mutually discuss the world around us, our actions and discussions will lead to new ideas and movements.
In the same right, it is also necessary to forge the future of design. A vast array of accountability derived from the structure of society has spread to the design domain, prompting the need for capable designers to respond to this need. Based on the belief that easily manageable solutions are necessary, the A-POC design concept was launched Though it is my impression that there is little change in the scope demanded of fashion design, I can only conclude that the design clout of organizations unable to create items from the stance of environmental engineering will inevitably weaken. Design, by definition, is the work of formulating certain balances, coordinations and other elements. There is thus a need, I feel, to clarify what specific balances need to be struck. For the very reason that diversity is expanding within the sphere of fashion, the demands of design are much greater. Because the social responsibility in this area is in another increasing trend, it is clear that the sphere of design (referred to as balancing abilities here) is expanding and it will be vital to mount effective responses to social demands.
HA: With the continued collaboration of fashion designers and various technicians—from within and outside the world of design—how do you envision fashion’s place within society evolving? How do the technologies now available to fashion designers change the identity of high art and more consumer fashion?
DF: It is impossible to truly discuss the diversity demanded in fashion in terms of a system that looks to Paris or Milan as the pinnacles. Each new logistical revolution in today’s Web society raises momentum explosive to fashion, threatening the status of the conventional collections (twice yearly fashion markets).
Within the Web society, the demand is for “graspable clothing.” This refers to so-called “real clothes” – that is, apparel which easily appeals to consumers and is readily understood by purchasers. In a world that now expands across borders of time and distance, such fashions are beginning to take on the power to change values and thinking. I believe that this impact is also being felt at the “fashion week” events in New York, Milan and Paris – forums for showcasing new creations.
There is also the concern, however, that on the flip side of excessive demands for easily understood results, the overall scene will become tedious. When proceeding with a focus on creation in an era in which both information and commodities have begun to take on their own values, it will likely become difficult to continue to hold up both sides of diverse and “graspable” clothing.
Basically speaking, I believe that fashion must be allotted a major degree of freedom within the world we live in. In the quest for freedom, failure to resolve new issues characterized by strong demands for social qualities will render it impossible to nurture the freedom that everyone recognizes and wants. In that sense, fashion designers who continue to exist in environments of freedom while fulfilling their social responsibilities may very well represent the “new cool.”
With regard to high art and consumer fashion, while the ability of designers to make ready use of technology may place major restrictions on their work, it will also become easier to successfully benefit from cost balance and quality guarantees. Likewise, while the use of technology by designers signifies the transition into work with a high degree of social impact from a management standpoint, it also means that designers are taking on heavy social responsibilities at the same time. If this foundation can be mobilized to render new proposals for consumers through the act of supplying the world with clothing, it will also come to wield great clout in society.
HA: Last year you teamed up with Dyson to create “Wind” as an element of the Spring show and this year the colors of the Amazon influenced your show. Please comment on the relationship between nature and fashion. What is the role of nature in your work? How has your relationship with and your vision of nature changed over the years? How do the natural elements of the show connect with your more technological leanings?
DF: Any worthwhile discussion of nature is incomplete without the inclusion of technology. It is patently clear, therefore, that technology has become indispensable in sustaining the Earth, as we know it. These influences have already been internalized in the realm of fashion as well.
HA: Conventionally, nature and technology seem as opposing forces, and yet both greatly influence your designs. How do they come together in for you in design? How do they complement one another, oppose one another, etc.?
DF: Please conceive that nature is you, yourself. Technology, furthermore, is also encapsulated within your being. While as you say, nature and technology appear to act as opposing forces, in reality they exist in a mutually complementary, give-and-take relationship.
HA: Academy has routinely placed fashion on the sidelines of scholarship, and yet museums and design forums are increasingly acknowledging the place of fashion as a historical artifact and commentary. How do you see fashion and design as a social commentary? Do you have advice for scholars on ways to study and analyze these artifacts?
DF: In recent years, the reality that fashion differs from its conventional image as an extravagant and festive celebration, and is in fact one component of the overall social fabric, has come to be understood through the lens of economic angles. Someday, perhaps, an economist specializing in fashion may be honored with the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences!
HA: Would you like to share anything more on your design philosophy?
DF: Nothing, whether it is new media or emerging circumstances or matters, ever springs into existence suddenly or from nothing. Rather, I believe it is people who sense that the old ideas and thinking no longer do the trick are the forces behind such evolution. Toward that end, to enter new realms through the medium of design, I believe in the need to create, through your own effort and volition, specific opportunities for encounters which demand decisive situations and events. Once you take part in something that needs change, you have put yourself on the path
2026