Koki Enomoto finds inspiration in the unlikeliest of places. Earlier this year, while out for a run, the designer stopped to catch his breath and looked up to see a piece of gray netting hanging from an overpass, fluttering delicately in the wind.
“I felt like I was seeing something invisible,” said Enomoto during a walkthrough at his showroom. “You can’t see the wind, but by making the fabric sway, it revealed the wind’s presence. I wondered what would happen if I applied that idea to clothing.”
That became the starting point for this latest Attachment collection, which Enomoto titled ‘Lightly’, and which he showed in a concrete warehouse outfitted with a single sheer white curtain lit from behind. As usual, he began with fabric, paying particular attention to how it moved on the body. He also merged categories of clothing to excise of anything extraneous, hence the shirt-blousons and easy tailoring that was sci-fi in its minimalism, but still read as comfortable.
“It was about determining the right amount of space between the fabric and the body, focusing not just on lightness, but on the character and silhouette the garment takes on when worn,” said Enomoto. To make his point, he held up an easy cotton shirt that had been given form with a drawstring at the waist. “When you make a garment oversized, it tends to lose its structure and doesn’t hold its form as beautifully, so we’ve tried to make things slimmer,” he said.
A slimmer fit, then, but not a suffocating one. Trucker jackets were made in translucent cupra cotton that reimagined a workwear staple into something that you might be able to wear for more than two weeks a year; striped hooded shirts in yellow silk billowed to reveal bare skin; and leather blazers were so thin that their sleeves could be rolled up as easily as if they had been made from poplin. It was a way of looking fully dressed, while feeling as though you were barely wearing anything at all.
