One day, a French postman tripped over a peculiar stone. Inspecting its unusual layers, he was inspired to build a palace he had seen in a dream. Over the course of 33 years, Ferdinand Cheval built Le Palais Idéal, pebble by pebble, in southeastern France.
“I related to that,” said Yohei Ohno after his show, explaining a season which he saw as a culmination his past decade of work. “Children build sandcastles, right? It’s like that, a kind of instinctive human desire, the desire to build something big by steadily stacking small things up.”
The collection on the runway splintered out into a scatter of showpieces: futuristic pannier skirts, cascading layers of cutout maple leaves and an interesting Fair Isle hoodie patched into a flap-skirt dress. Another, in the shape of a cheese grater, was baby pink and covered in hand mirrors; yet another was studded with a handful of LEDs that glowed like moonlight on the fuzzy blue fabric. The show concluded with a T-shirt dress that was a mirror of itself, with raglan sleeves that extended into a cape.
Ohno’s strange silhouettes and experimental fabrications are full of naïveté. Even so, the best pieces here were the ones that mixed his idiosyncrasies with real wearability: the chic blue chemise with extra sleeves that hung at the waist was sophisticated, and so was the asymmetric red knit that rumpled elegantly at the shoulders.
It wasn’t a trendy collection by any stretch, but that in itself is part of Ohno’s magnetism—the palace he has built won’t be to everyone’s taste, but still it stands. To quote Cheval: “Let those who think they can do better try.”