—2021.06.22—
Takahiro Miyashita, who looms in the fashion vision, is the 30th year of his design career in 2021.
From Riharajuku to the world, Miyashita Takahiro is undoubtedly the tonic of Japanese fashion, from the heyday of Harajuku street to the Hi-end route, hoping to break free from the shackles of Harajuku Fashion. Innovation and subversion have created a style that Miyashita Takahiro is difficult to figure out, and the creative concept of not repeating it also makes the name Ofehiro Miyashita full of expectations.
In rare interviews, Miyashita also said: "I don't want to belong to anything, I study various different cultures just to get rid of the inherent style of Harajuku." I'm always learning, constantly changing, using a different new perspective every time, and I don't want to repeat the same thing."
Takahiro Miyashita was born in Tokyo in 1973 by his father a composer, so music played an important role in his life. For fashion, Miyashita has been deeply influenced by the American clothes worn by his brother since he was a child. Therefore, Miyashita already wore Levi's 501 and leather boots in middle school; in high school, he had to quit school because of drinking, absenteeism, and fighting, and finally had to quit school and did not have a fixed work history.
After dropping out of high school, Takahiro Miyashita worked at a shop selling cowboy boots in Roppongi and went to work at PROPELLER, a vintage shop in Harajuku, where he lied about his age and went to work, but the shop was also the starting point of Miyashita's fashion career. At the age of 18, he went down to BEAMS as a clerk to learn store management, and then began to help different brands as stylist assistants, developing a keen sense of collocation.
After experiencing the styling assistant, he joined Nepenthes, in fact, the first time he received an invitation from Keisho Shimizu, he started as early as miyashita when he was 16 years old, only because Kishita would go to the Nepenthes store 2-3 times a week to see the clothes, although he did not have the money to buy clothes, but he would carefully observe the fabrics, workmanship, details, and customers in the store. In the end, because he often visited Nepenthes, he was favored by the boss Shimizu, but at that time, Miyashita's inner wish was to go to the United States to live, because he did not want to give up his wish and shirked Nepenthes's invitation.
When Takahiro Miyashita was 19 years old, Keisa Shimizu had the idea of expanding into the United States and invited Miyashita to join Nepenthes. Miyashita's work in Nepenthes as a clothing planner and comprador, planner, PRESS, buyer, etc., gave him a comprehensive understanding of brand operation. While in the United States, Miyashita used the only money he had to make purchases and disassembled and reorganized his clothes, a process that taught him how to design and brew a unique aesthetic of clothing.
For Miyashita's fashion consciousness, but the use of music alone is not enough to show the full picture of Miyashita's creative soul, "rock", "weird", "dark", "gorgeous", "decadent", "retro", "radical".... For Miyashita Takahiro, there seems to be no exact word that can sum him up, as if jumping into a subcultural philosophical world, style and design collide with the strongest chemical reaction in the fashion industry.
"I've been thinking about how to get cooler. I thought, if I hadn't met those friends, that wouldn't have happened. Also, I think the special feel of clothing is crucial to shaping my identity, and looking back, I really take a lot from the streets." In an exclusive interview, Takahiro Miyashita recalls the rebellious times of his early years. After leaving school, he initially worked in a grocery store, then went to Check Mate magazine as an assistant stylist, and the only little income he had was spent on buying clothes, and Miyashita would disassemble the purchased items in order to remake them, which was the beginning of his contact with design, no one to guide, and perhaps no reference at all. The encounter with Nepenthes in the mid-1990s really opened Miyashita's eyes and laid the foundation for his future creation of Number (N)ine.
Takahiro Miyashita, who loves costume design, was encouraged by KeisaMizu Shimizu to found Number (N)ine in 1996, inspired by the recurring lyric "number nine" in The Beatles song "Revolution 9".
Takahiro Miyashita also makes no secret of his love and quality for music in Number (N)ine, and his design also pays homage to rock stars, such as George Harrison, John Lennon, Joe Strummer, Axl Rose, Kurt Cobain, etc., combining alternative music and youth culture, Number (N)ine gradually began to leave Seharajuku.
Number (N)ine since its release in runway Show incorporates Miyashita's crazy ideas every season, not a compromise on design and materials, and this is also costly - Miyashita began to receive psychopharmacology, and sometimes Miyashita looked at some of his old designs, and he didn't remember to design them, so that some quarters were shut down and caused the quarters to be incomplete.
As Number (N)ine grew, Takahiro Miyashita was unable to create as he pleased with kooks' business expansion, so he chose to leave, and he said in an interview with Sense magazine:
In a conversation with Eugene Rabkin, founder of StyleZeitgeist, Miyashita revealed the reason for his departure: "For me, designing costumes is like making music, Number (N)ine has become a professional band, a band I don't want to join, I am losing myself, I no longer think I am expressing myself through these costumes.
Music, especially rock music, as the core essence of Miyashita's works, almost fully represents the external skeleton and inner emotions of the Number (N)ine series.
The dress of a musician is a manifestation of his own spiritual world, and as the late American musician Frank Zappa said, no iteration of musical style will survive unless accompanied by a change in the style of clothing.
The right to free expression of creativity is at the heart of cult designers like Takahiro Miyashita, where there is no possibility of compromise, and it is not about a change in design style or anything that can be presented from the surface of the clothing image. It connects the designer's personal world, intimate experiences, and thoughts that cannot be expressed in words, and when this passage creates a crack that cannot be bridged, Miyashita's "loyalty" to himself prompts him to make a choice.
As far as the profession of fashion design is concerned, there is an almost sharp contrast and distinction between the cobain and the designers who are not from the co-class, which is particularly evident in the early stages of their respective costume creation. Creatives who have received college education will mostly choose to start from the direction of fabric, tailoring, texture, etc. In general, the composition of clothing can be seen as the creative framework of college designers, his/her style grammar, personal perspective, most of them around this framework. The focus of the non-class creatives, in summary, is not to focus on the elements of the clothing composition, but to place the interpretive scenes and crowds of the costumes, as well as their corresponding cultural settlements and ancillary group effects, in the center.
Takahiro Miyashita is a typical representative of designers who are not from the class.
Miyashita's close friend, UNDERCOVER founder Dun Takahashi, once said that the difference between their group of designers and the older generation of Japanese designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto is that they are more influenced by youth culture, especially music.
This group of designers, including Takahashi Dun and Miyashita Takahiro, in their youth, that is, the important period of value formation, received the impact and nourishment from Western youth culture indiscriminately, and they longed for the sense of identity given by the group settlement, and formed a demand for clothing to show identity and attitude on this tone. The punk gene that Takahashi Shield injected into UNDERCOVER more than once expresses the idea that we make noise, not clothes, and in the context of Number (N)ine's works, people can sometimes perceive the world of rock music and independent films constructed by Takahiro Miyashita, which is also born against the bone and does not follow the rules.
There is an extreme opposition between his sharp and unruly design theme and his shy personality, but this does not prevent Number (N)ine and Takahiro Miyashita from becoming a new force in the Japanese wave of the Parisian fashion scene.
"Men's traditional clothing looks consistent, like a dark blue blazer with gray pants and so on. Why do people only want to see a certain type of clothing for men? What I wanted to achieve was the kind of vision that I and Takahashi Shield had done —diversity, and a broader vision of menswear. Clothing should have colors and dreams."
Although Miyashita served as a fashion designer for 20 years, the fashion media could not regard him as one of the "old-fashioned", and Miyashita's style could not be defined exactly. In TheSoloist. You can still see a lot of number of number (N)ine late rock Grunge, gorgeous retro, black decadent and other elements, but each piece is labeled The Soloist. The pieces all reveal the DNA of Takahiro Miyashita, and both the cut and the color are extremely personal aesthetics, and they have always been presented with freshness.
Although Takahiro Miyashita is always considered by some to be the elder of the fashion industry, but as he puts it: "The obvious difference between the new generation and us is that we have been trying to create something freely, but we are not so free and find solutions from our mistakes, whereas people today are just the opposite." It's been a long time since anyone has done anything truly novel, so I think it's time for someone to do something and I can feel that there might be a new Kurt Cobain coming up."
At the same time I don't feel like a designer, and I'm no different from those designers who started designing yesterday, my curiosity about fashion and clothing making hasn't changed since I was 19 years old, and when you're called a senator, it should be over."