Like gazing at the clouds, or staring at the inkblots of a Rorschach test, the beauty in Ryunosuke Okazaki’s work is that it can appear as almost anything. Is that a butterfly? A kabuki mask? The face of a frog? Nothing is planned or intended; everything is open to interpretation. “There’s a strange feeling that comes with seeing something that at first doesn’t appear to be a dress, but it is a dress,” the designer said from a large showroom space in Tokyo, as he walked around mannequins dressed in his latest creations.
Now on his fourth collection, named 003 (he began at 000), the 28-year-old designer continued his ongoing investigation into the concepts of prayer and of peace this season, with a menagerie of dresses and headpieces that were his most complex yet. Incorporating multiple colors into single items for the first time, he also introduced light-catching velour to the mix, creating tangled shapes that shimmered with depth. “The velour creates shadows, and it really stirred something up in me, like something cosmic or imaginary,” he said.
As always, Okazaki made his sculptures via automatism—an approach he landed upon after reading André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto during the pandemic. Okazaki is the conduit; his creations build themselves in a kind of mitosis. “I make my works very unconsciously, by hand. It feels like the cells are dividing and each piece has its own personality in the end,” he said. “They take on a life of their own.”
Okazaki’s preoccupations come from his childhood growing up in Hiroshima, and the shadow cast by the atomic bomb on the city’s history. It’s this that initially drew Okazaki to Japan’s Jomon period (14,000–300 B.C.), “a peaceful time when we were praying to nature and farming together.” This season again he drew on the era’s pottery, which, with its flame-like flourishes and rotund, humanoid shapes, looks like it could belong to an alien civilization.
Though the updates were subtle, Okazaki was hungry for a challenge and traveled to London to collaborate with the stylist Robbie Spencer on the look book. It ignited a fresh sense of ambition: “I realized that I want to compete properly in the fashion industry,” he said, adding that he intends to make more wearable clothes in future seasons, and show them in Europe.
For the time being, Okazaki funds his work by selling his sculptures and wall hangings to art collectors in Asia and beyond—a black dress from his 002 collection was bought by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and will be displayed at the “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” exhibit that opens this month in New York. Okazaki had not, he said, received any requests to dress anyone for the Met Gala’s red carpet this year, but it will only be a matter of time.