Esprit Dior Tokyo Part Two

Part two of my Dior Tokyo experience and into the vast Ryogkoku Kokugikan Sumo Stadium we go. I can’t communicate how vast the scale was. Dior venues under Raf Simons’ tenure have been lavish, ornate but never vast on this level. It felt like the “biggest” Dior show I had been to because of the sheer number of people there coupled with the mega height of the vaulted ceiling of this stadium from which “snow” fell through a futuristic suspended grid structure. Official numbers said 800 people were there but it felt like more because technically the venue can hold 10,000 people.

It was vast for a reason though. It wasn’t just to wow the selected journalists that were flown in for the show. On the upper tiers of the stadium sat Tokyo’s younger generation – the Shibuya and Harajuku kids and IT-people that are fast becoming influencers in their own right. They’re the sort of peeps that you wouldn’t see at a regular Japan Fashion Week show (JFW’s cachet of cool is an up and down affair but that’s another story) but here they were, made to feel inclusive and invited at one of the biggest Dior shows ever to be staged. After the show, Sidney Toledano was eager to talk up Japan’s strength as a market, asking us to disregard recent news that it has entered recession again. The Japanese know and are ready to spend on luxury and have done so for a very long time and Dior are ready to reciprocate.

Those sentiments were echoed by Raf Simons himself, as someone who knows Tokyo well, with Japan being a primary supporter of his own namesake brand. The collection began before Tokyo had even been discussed as a destination for the show. Simons has been building up his repertoire at Dior based on ideals of seeking modernity – he’s done so by exploring both Dior’s past and more recently, the distant past in his last ready to wear and haute couture shows. For this particular collection, he thrusts us back into the present and into his own nuanced observations of Tokyo street style from the well-proliferated images of Fruits magazine to actually being in Tokyo many times himself and seeing street style tribes shift from place to place. This put him in good stead to avoid any cultural cliches and of course, he moves as far away from say, Monsieur Dior’s Hokusai and Utamaro-drenched vision of Japan.

“Tokyo is a place that has been and is so constantly inspiring to me,” Simons says in the press notes. “Particularly in terms of the liberty people take for themselves in how they dress, there is nowhere else like it: the freedom of styles, the new architecture of clothing that you can see forming in the street as well as in city’s fashion design history…. it’s a place that is both extreme and exhilarating.”

These are sentiments that I fully concur with having been hugely inspired by my trips to Tokyo and it’s clear that the freedom and liberty in Tokyo street style was translated into the layering of the collection. A sequinned polo neck under a strapless bias cut gown with chunky boots? Why not! Likewise, school uniform-esque checked shifts over sequinned bloomers? Cho kawaii! And I mean that not in the “cute” sense but in the general way that the word is used to describe anything vaguely cool. Traditionally outdoors-y fabrics employed on a plethora of outerwear pieces points to the way that “heritage” wear has exploded in Japan, mainly in menswear. When rendered as dramatic opera coats and zip-up flared-out dresses with sculptural knee high boots though, that street style trope is subverted. Same goes for Simons’ use of sequins. He admitted he is normally a sequins-hater but when used on Aran and Argyle knits and on polo neck pieces, he nullifies the glam and evening aspect of this motif.

The language of Dior, namely in the Bar jacket, faintly persists but is also deconstructed so that the shape lingers on in waxed cotton jackets and coats and duffles and bombers. After the show, Simons said this was outerwear that could be chucked on the floor and become an old favourite over time.

In a way it’s easy to see a parallel between the freedom and contrasts seen within Japanese streetstyle and the way that Simons has been incorporating a similar sense of freedom and unexpected contrasts within Dior’s house DNA, in order to push its aesthetic forward into the 21st century. This collection falls in line within the trajectory that Simons has been building up at the house – one that has been exciting to witness.

Dior are banking on this love letter to Japan to translate anywhere in the world. They made it big so that the word would spread and by now, fans of the Dior universe will have heard about the sumo stadium, the fleet of Dior taxis and of course, the clothes. Dior aren’t officially calling it a pre-fall collection and instead it has its own fancy name – Esprit Dior Tokyo collection but that doesn’t stop it from being a collection that will be on the rails longer than the main ready to wear collections and that it will have an appeal that goes far and beyond Tokyo.

As the afterparty pulsated on through the night and we moved into the intimate rooms of the kooky bar Trump Room, then into a random karaoke place in Shibuya and finally queueing up at Sushi Daiwa in Tsukiji market, dressed in my own head to toe Dior outfit (a mish mash of AW14 pieces), it felt like Simons’ vision for the house was being truly vindicated. Breaking out of the house’s remit of occasion wear will reap rewards as a new generation of Dior customers can get in on the action, stumbling around the streets in bar bombers, panelled flat chelsea boots and layered up in sequinned polo necks to get through the cold nights. You could already see these clothes in situ and on-the-go and that’s more exhilarating than any static lavish ball gown.