Mister It. Tokyo Spring 2025
Takuya Isagawa is a traditional fashion soul with a contemporary sense of humor. The Mister It designer is enamored with the fashion world as it existed in white-gloved ateliers of eras past (he cut his teeth on the design team at Margiela, where he worked on the main line and artisanal collections), and his Tokyo-based brand is an attempt at bottling that sense of fantasy and mixing it with some tongue-in-cheek (but crucially accessible) absurdity.
His spring show, titled Open Fitting, rewound the clock to postwar Paris and unfolded like an old-world haute couture salon presentation in a modern-day Tokyo studio. There were even gilded chairs. When everyone was seated, the designer came out to explain the concept and then stood off to the side, whereâlooking every bit the old-school dressmaker with a pincushion attached to his wristâhe added the finishing touches to each model before sending them off to do their turn about the space, name cards in hand.
A cast of automated voices over the speakers explained each look in brief. Isagawa uses his friends as muses, and every season he makes items that he thinks would mesh well with their lives and personalities. For instance, a jacket for his PR pal Nadine came complete with a gusset pocket âso she can hold a lot of PR tickets,â while a white cotton shirt cobbled together from love-heart cutouts (a Mister It signature) was made for Klaudia, âwho combines seriousness and charm.â
Though referencing his friendsâ personalities is a core part of Mister Itâs shtick and serves to add a sense of real-life warmth to his work, it raises the question: Does anybody want to wear clothes made with somebody else in mind? Perhaps thatâs why the standout pieces of this collection werenât the items bearing names but the mud-dyed jackets and floaty dresses that had been made by sewing together silk scarves. They turned out to be a nod to Isagawaâs own heritage; the designerâs family has been in the silk scarf business since his great-grandfatherâs generation, and the mud-dyeing technique he used comes from Amami Oshima, a Japanese island where the other side of his family hails from. As well as the satisfying starkness of dark brown against the vivid colors of the scarves, the mud-dyeing added depth and texture to the silk. They were âtwo opposites that have never crossed paths,â read the show notes.
When the presentation was over, Isagawa put his hands together and said, âThatâs it!â Though it still read as self-referential performance art, the whole thing was refreshingly unfussy and straightforwardâa fashion show about clothes of all things! âI love haute couture because itâs so beautiful and wonderful. Itâs not something that ordinary people get to experience, so I want to make a little haute couture that can be worn easily or casually,â Isagawa said backstage. A tough contradiction of a task heâs given himself there, but the way one of the T-shirts billowed out into a gownlike train at the back, elegant as anything, was enough to sustain the illusion.
