When Shinya Kozuka visited his family in Osaka for the New Year’s holiday, he spent a lot of time thinking about the moon. His late grandfather, a hobbyist photographer, had pictures of Kozuka as a child hanging on the wall, as well as red carnations that Kozuka had made on a sewing machine for Mother’s Day 20 years ago. “When I saw them, I had a feeling similar to what I get when I look at the moon. I thought, ‘oh, the moon is floating in my room’,” he explained.
And so, in a dark hall of the Tokyo Science Museum on a balmy July evening, Kozuka showed a moon-soaked, somnambulant collection that evoked the romantic loneliness peculiar to the small hours. White gradients of moonlight lit up the black button-up shirts and tailored trousers that opened the show, later reappearing on toweled dressing gowns, alongside beaded embellishments and those aforementioned crimson carnations.
From there we drifted into aprons and coats embroidered with a tapestry landscape that could have been the Amalfi Coast or else some fictional storybook town—populated by swans, picture frames, and tiny yellow moons that resembled bananas. It lent a rustic, pastoral nostalgia to the collection, compounded by the wallpaper floral pajamas and the calico chore coats and shorts decorated with faded red stripes—the kind you see on vintage tea towels. Strawberry-colored gingham was needle-punched to give it a worn-in (slept-in?) handle, and some of the models wore half-pulled-off socks which flopped on their feet as they walked, as though they’d just got out of bed. The curly moons that they held in their arms or sported on their heads were based on Kozuka’s own illustrations.
As anyone who has followed Kozuka’s progress will have noticed, the moon is one of the designer’s enduring motifs, alongside wintertime and taking long walks through the city. “These are themes I think I’ll use forever. If I’m asked to choose between the sun and the moon, I’ll choose the moon, and if I’m asked to choose summer or winter, I’ll choose winter,” he said. “I’m drawn to dark things.”
In his show notes (which are poem-like and always lovely to read), he wrote the following: “The moments when fashion moves me are rarely driven by logic. They’re vague, abstract, hard to explain—and I’ve come to believe that’s what makes them powerful.” Kozuka’s strength as a designer is his ability to take these personal, often surreal ideas and transmogrify them into clothing that feels stylish, realistic, and consistent. The oversized, chilled-out silhouettes temper the whimsy and stop anything crossing the line into costume; it’s not uncommon to see his baggy sweatpants on fashion-forward young Tokyoites.
Before long, we might be seeing them elsewhere too: the brand has steadily grown its stockists in recent seasons, and Kozuka is hoping to put on his first runway show in Europe in the not-too-far future. First the moon, next the stars.