The journey as a memory, as nature, as artistic research. This is where a particular tension between art and nature takes root: Ipnotica first edition from Kioku.
This series of “object-clothes”, born out of an alchemical reinterpretation of memories of travel captured by a camera, tells the story of an unexpected encounter between Japan and the Western American Parks. This inspiration, where reality blends into the dreamworld, gives life to hypnotic designs transposed onto silk twills from ancient silk factories in Como.
The result? A sartorial poem consisting of nine kaleidoscopic patterns spread across twelve outfits, providing the possibility of over one hundred different combinations and allowing the wearer to play with endless interpretations. Here, there are no timings, constraints, or barriers.
The essential proportions, pure volumes, and use of a precious material, namely silk, combined with strictly Italian craftsmanship constitute the heart of this project, which features clothes with a soft line that, underlining forms without defining them, gently sway and flutter on the body, following its movements as nature’s truest ideal of grace.
What emerges is a natural silhouette, as fine and gentle as a pencil stroke, in which aesthetic clarity melds with hypnotic labyrinths of colour which occasionally reflect energetic bursts of light or the delicacy of a flower whose handsome petals take on different shades in the light of a sunrise or sunset. Such is the case with the pinkish hues of Hanami Blossom, formed by mandala-carpets of cherry blossom petals, or the iridescent green reflections that explode in Green Heights, a journey through the centuries-old sequoias of the American park named for its stately residents.
In a fluid and free association, the words of Roland Barthes – as written in the Empire of Signs – come to mind here: “from that part of the world – down there – I can take a certain number of traits and use them to deliberately make a system”. At once modern and timeless.
