A well-known magazine editor pulled out a leather perfecto and herringbone tweed riding jacket hybrid from Chitose Abe’s fall 2013 Sacai collection and was seen wearing it around Fashion Week. Abe has been hybridizing garments—making pieces that look like one thing coming, and another thing going, or merging disparate elements into one item of clothing—for 25 years. She’s a Japanese institution in Paris, but her show today felt like a breakthrough.
Backstage afterwards, she said her instinct was to convince people to dress up more, and she meant that literally. Each and every one of the 46 looks she sent down the runway was a dress. The trench with the checked silk handkerchief layers underneath—all one piece. The black field jacket and white stand-up collar button-down—all one piece. The pinstripe blazer and windowpane plaid check kilt—well, you get the idea. The dress as a concept sounds straightforward enough, but when you consider the pattern-making that went into rendering these multilayered looks as single—and singular—garments, you can’t help but be wowed.
And as for the tuxedo pants with the silk stripes down the outside of the legs, those weren’t pants at all, but, as some of the pictures make clear, over-the-knee stacked heel boots combined with the bottom halves of trousers. Abe’s pantaboots, as we will settle for calling them until someone comes up with something different and better, were the most extreme versions of a look that’s been percolating elsewhere this season (Balenciaga and Fendi, for example) and one that a noted retailer said afterwards they were excited about the sale potential of.
Abe’s two-things-at-once mash-ups have proven influential across the spectrum of fashion, and made her incredibly successful. This season’s trapeze shapes and military-slash-preppy references were familiar parts of her vocabulary, and the results were recognizably Sacai, but her process seemed to be about a self-set challenge to break her own rules. That kind of thing doesn’t happen often enough in fashion, especially in this moment when creativity is falling into second place behind caution. Maybe that’s why the room felt so energized. As the crowd dispersed, a different editor observed, “Chitose is a real designer.”