Remember when that old friend of yours asked your opinion on the Arab spring and you said Hussein Chalayan’s SS12 collection wasn’t too strong but Nasir Mazhar’s stuff was looking good? That was mortifyingly embarrassing, huh? And, by the way, made you sound borderline racist, because Turkish people are not Arabs.Anyway, the best method of clawing back any shred of respect from a situation like that, while also demonstrating that you really do have an interest in geopolitical issues as well as pretty clothes, is to become an advocate for Japanese designer Ryohei Kawanishi. He collages together socio-political-inspired images, employs layered fabrics to signify layers of meaning and tangles fabric to represent the way issues are inextricably intertwined to produce wearable reportage on whatever’s bothering him in the world. Sure, this sounds pretentious, but it's also sort of genius-level insane, and anyway, expensive clothes, by definition, sort of always are. You'll probably remember his graduate collection as, “That ridiculously insane show with the bummed-out looking Hasidic Jew, junkyard fabric, the huge UN flag and all the Twitter and Facebook logos.”A piece from Kawanishi's tsunami-ravaged Entropy collection.VICE: So, tell me about your Entropy collection. It was based around the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, right?
Ryohei Kawanishi: Yeah, I was trying to describe everything that had happened in Japan since March 11th. Japanese fashion exploded in the 80s with Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto shows in Paris in 1981 and I remember how all the journalists at the time were analysing their collections as, like, post-Hiroshima work, or post-atomic bomb work and I loved how the Japanese designers were really commenting on something, you know?So you’re trying to bring some of that element of commentary back into Japanese design?
Yeah, more contemporary social and political issues, rather than what’s going on in pop culture. Most people take inspiration from magazines or musicians, or whatever, which can be an interesting approach, but I wanted to do something different. Economics and politics are something that really interest me, so it made sense to take elements of those and collage them together in my design.Is that cathartic for you and a good way of getting your worldview across?
I actually don’t put too much of my personal opinion in there, it’s more taking the information I’ve seen as an observer and melding that with my designs to create something new. For example, in my graduate collection, I attached shoes to the exterior of the clothes and painted the soles with the colours of the Palestinian flag to show how I thought Palestine was getting stamped on.Very clever. What similar techniques did you use with Entropy?
Well, the disaster in Japan brought so many issues to the fore and they all became irretrievably intertwined and tangled up with each other, so I tried to make the clothes represent that by giving them a really tangled look, with many different fabrics being woven into each other.From the untitled Central Saint Martins graduate show.And the clothes were pretty fucked up too, huh? They looked like they’d actually been through the tsunami.
Yeah, exactly. I liked how Comme used to cut holes in their knitwear in order to signify destruction, so I tried applying some of that to this collection. Also, I painted the clothes with salt to represent the sea water in the tsunami and tried to create a concrete texture by mixing sand with glue and painting that over the clothes.What about your graduate collection?
That was a total reaction to the global democratic revolution going on at the time and also touched on some of the issues going on in the Middle East. Egypt and Tunisia had just had their revolutions and I was interested in how social media was being used to topple governments and these huge, established institutions, which is what all the social media logos were about.Where did the Gaza conflict and UN references fit into that?
Oh, that was a different part of the story I told with that collection. It was a United Nations decision to establish Israel as an independent country, so the UN logo was there to signify the beginnings of conflict with the Palestinian population and, like I said, I added other elements, like the boot-stomping to tell that story.Fair enough. And what was with the masses of fabric you used in that collection?
That was a way of reflecting the enormity of everything that was happening. I suppose it’s the same as the tsunami – there were so many different layers to the developments throughout the Arab spring, so I layered lots of different types of fabric over each other to reflect that.Cool, I like this representative fabric thing you've got going. How does your work go down in Japan? Isn't the UK less responsive to your more out-there work than the Japanese market?
Actually, no. It seems like the Japanese are less interested in the themes I’m trying to touch on in my work. People are far more into stuff like animation – they think that’s the coolest thing ever – but I think real issues are worth a lot more of our attention than stuff like that.So what is your market?
You know, I’m not sure whether my work would be better received in the art system or the fashion system, but I’d like to try showing a collection in a gallery and on the catwalk at the same time to see what the responses are like. My next collection will be socially-funded, with people making donations to help keep me designing, so it’s going to be interesting to see who is actually out there supporting my work.
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Ryohei Kawanishi: Yeah, I was trying to describe everything that had happened in Japan since March 11th. Japanese fashion exploded in the 80s with Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto shows in Paris in 1981 and I remember how all the journalists at the time were analysing their collections as, like, post-Hiroshima work, or post-atomic bomb work and I loved how the Japanese designers were really commenting on something, you know?So you’re trying to bring some of that element of commentary back into Japanese design?
Yeah, more contemporary social and political issues, rather than what’s going on in pop culture. Most people take inspiration from magazines or musicians, or whatever, which can be an interesting approach, but I wanted to do something different. Economics and politics are something that really interest me, so it made sense to take elements of those and collage them together in my design.Is that cathartic for you and a good way of getting your worldview across?
I actually don’t put too much of my personal opinion in there, it’s more taking the information I’ve seen as an observer and melding that with my designs to create something new. For example, in my graduate collection, I attached shoes to the exterior of the clothes and painted the soles with the colours of the Palestinian flag to show how I thought Palestine was getting stamped on.
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Well, the disaster in Japan brought so many issues to the fore and they all became irretrievably intertwined and tangled up with each other, so I tried to make the clothes represent that by giving them a really tangled look, with many different fabrics being woven into each other.From the untitled Central Saint Martins graduate show.And the clothes were pretty fucked up too, huh? They looked like they’d actually been through the tsunami.
Yeah, exactly. I liked how Comme used to cut holes in their knitwear in order to signify destruction, so I tried applying some of that to this collection. Also, I painted the clothes with salt to represent the sea water in the tsunami and tried to create a concrete texture by mixing sand with glue and painting that over the clothes.What about your graduate collection?
That was a total reaction to the global democratic revolution going on at the time and also touched on some of the issues going on in the Middle East. Egypt and Tunisia had just had their revolutions and I was interested in how social media was being used to topple governments and these huge, established institutions, which is what all the social media logos were about.Where did the Gaza conflict and UN references fit into that?
Oh, that was a different part of the story I told with that collection. It was a United Nations decision to establish Israel as an independent country, so the UN logo was there to signify the beginnings of conflict with the Palestinian population and, like I said, I added other elements, like the boot-stomping to tell that story.Fair enough. And what was with the masses of fabric you used in that collection?
That was a way of reflecting the enormity of everything that was happening. I suppose it’s the same as the tsunami – there were so many different layers to the developments throughout the Arab spring, so I layered lots of different types of fabric over each other to reflect that.Cool, I like this representative fabric thing you've got going. How does your work go down in Japan? Isn't the UK less responsive to your more out-there work than the Japanese market?
Actually, no. It seems like the Japanese are less interested in the themes I’m trying to touch on in my work. People are far more into stuff like animation – they think that’s the coolest thing ever – but I think real issues are worth a lot more of our attention than stuff like that.So what is your market?
You know, I’m not sure whether my work would be better received in the art system or the fashion system, but I’d like to try showing a collection in a gallery and on the catwalk at the same time to see what the responses are like. My next collection will be socially-funded, with people making donations to help keep me designing, so it’s going to be interesting to see who is actually out there supporting my work.