Super Sacai

>> It’s been a tip top week on the Selfridges front .  I went in one day to check out the Board Games installation and the next for a lovely lunch to celebrate Sacai’s first shop in shop in a London department store, better known as the biggest selection of Sacai outside of Tokyo.  It’s the lush bit of icing that tops what has been a spectacular ascent for Chitose Abe’s label.  The fact that I’ll be wearing a bit of Sacai at shows and people will recognise it immediately and then proceed to gush for at least two minutes about how great Sacai is (polite fash ppl chit chat averages out at a time of 45 seconds normally), just shows what sort of a momentum the label is experiencing at the moment.

The A/W 14-5 show merely continued that upward climb.  Abe’s codes are firmly established now.  She’s a premier mixologist, taking something familiar and spinning it through clever pattern cutting and collaging techniques to create spliced and diced garments that ultimately  feel like value for money when you really take a closer look  (see my Sacai anatomical breakdown).  There’s no getting away form it.  Her coats (and there were many brilliant coats this season) were some of the season’s most alluring as they bounced up and down the runway to a reworked Gay Marvine Edit of Sister Sledge’s Lost in Music.  That pounding remix was akin to what Abe was doing to recognsiable codes of puffer jackets, men’s overcoats, biker jackets, kilt skirts and cable knit jumpers – she’s cutting them up and mixing them up, turning up and down the dials of volume and opacity where necessary.  Shearling and Mongolian fur collars had swagger when mixed with padded nylon coats.  Check patterns are arranged in such a way that they draw definitive lines on the body as they sashay down on aerated sheer pleated skirts and blouses.  Cable knit jumpers get cropped and somehow morph into boyish blazers.  Typing this all up doesn’t even make much sense unless you match it up with pictures.

 

Now Londoners and visitors can go one step better and see it for themselves in Sacai’s store.  Just be quick.  As many of Sacai’s stockists like Net-a-Porter and Dover Street Market can attest, star pieces sell out fast, and apparently that’s also the case at Sacai’s light-filled shop-in-shop in Selfridges, where they’re already having to re-order pieces.  They’ve got quite an impressive corner where natural light floods in highlighting the silhouettes of their impressive from all angles current S/S 14 collection.  In a space of this size, you really get to appreciate the trapeze volumes, the circular puffed-out shapes and the differences between the front-and-back of garments.  I’ve been saving up for my next trip to Tokyo in April where inevitably there will be a Sacai splurge, but a Sacai stash somewhere closer to home is definitely more than welcome.