What’s the difference between a gimmick and a good idea? One makes you grimace, the other makes you grin.
By that metric, the mesmerizing, mirthful runway show from the Japanese label Anrealage, held in Paris on Tuesday afternoon, was a very good idea.
Because after already seeing clothes so square they looked like something out of “Minecraft,” and after witnessing platform shoes shaped like slip-on Cybertrucks, when then the label’s blocky designs agitated to life like an arcade game, the only proper response was to grin.
As the designer Kunihiko Morinaga explained after the show, these clothes were produced from yarns laced all over with teensy LED “balls.” Picture a Times Square billboard packaged into a swaying sack dress. Each design had a battery pack and sensor, allowing the display to be manipulated backstage. (The material is proprietary to Anrealage and was developed with MPLUSPLUS, a Japanese technology design studio.)
The result was like “Tron” crossed with “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
Three flickering dresses recalled the lights of a skyscraper in the hands of a hyperactive toddler. A pair of models marched side by side, their tartan smocks ping-ponging colors back and forth to each other to form new kaleidoscopic tartans as they advanced.
For the finale, models clustered together, their frocks devolving into the pixely static of a TV on the fritz, then resolving into a stained-glass motif, a seeming nod to the American Cathedral where the show was put on.
This collection, Mr. Morinaga said backstage through a translator, was inspired by quite an archaic technology: two-sided advertising placards that “sandwich men” use to shill for businesses.
“Before the design was always fixed, but now we can move the design,” Mr. Morinaga said.
Here was a fashion show that fully seemed to accept our tech-addled age. It was, at least, a reminder of how static fashion can be. Almost all other labels showing at Paris Fashion Week will continue to use the same wools and cottons that have been in circulation for centuries.
Not Mr. Morinaga. He is fashion’s Carl Sagan, tilting toward the cosmos to question how far one man can take a dress. His previous exploits include clothes that inflated on the runway and tabula rasa ensembles that took on patterns when subjected to UV light. It is a missed opportunity that an Olympic team didn’t tap Mr. Morinaga to weave his wizardry onto their opening ceremony kits for the Paris Games.
“Fashion is something that never stops and is always moving and changing,” Mr. Morinaga said, summing up his ethos.
He is striding into the future. Even if there aren’t many who seem to be willing to join him there. Yet.
As we stepped out onto the Parisian streets, it was tough to picture someone in a digitized “Starry Night” dress striding beside me. None of our clothes yet had LCD screens on them. What we were wearing were those grins. And maybe that was Mr. Morinaga’s intent all along.
