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Entertainment

Revolutions and Tsunamis Are Mega Fashion

Ryohei Kawanishi is on that genius level of insane—mixing socio-political images with his layered and tangled fashion.
Jamie Clifton
London, GB

Remember when that old friend of yours asked your opinion on the Arab spring and you said Hussein Chalayan’s SS12 collection wasn’t too strong but Nasir Mazhar’s stuff was looking good? That was mortifyingly embarrassing, huh? And, by the way, it made you sound borderline racist, because Turkish people are not Arabs.

Anyway, the best method of clawing back any shred of respect from a situation like that, while also demonstrating that you really do have an interest in geopolitical issues as well as pretty clothes, is to become an advocate for Japanese designer Ryohei Kawanishi. He collages together socio-political-inspired images, employs layered fabrics to signify layers of meaning, and tangles fabric to represent the way issues are inextricably intertwined to produce wearable reportage on whatever’s bothering him in the world. Sure, this sounds pretentious, but it's also sort of genius-level insane, and anyway, expensive clothes, by definition, sort of always are. You'll probably remember his graduate collection as, “That ridiculously insane show with the bummed-out-looking Hasidic Jew, junkyard fabric, the huge UN flag, and all the Twitter and Facebook logos.”

For more on Ryohei Kawanishi visit VICEStyle.com