Inside ANREALAGE's 25th Anniversary Paris Retrospective
Kunihiko Morinaga shares details about his light-reactive, LED-lit archive on exhibition in collaboration with Sarah Andelman and Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk.
The relationship between technology and fashion has never felt closer, with wearables and smart glasses partnerships turning up alongside increasingly immersive runway showcases. Yet, no designer has pursued that relationship with quite the relentless optimism of Kunihiko Morinaga of ANREALAGE, who believes the day the boundary between the two disappears “has already come.”
Since launching the brand in 2003, he has been shortlisted for the LVMH Prize and became the first Japanese designer FENDI ever partnered with, and chances are you’ve seen his work without realizing it, whether on Beyoncé across two of her world tours or on the heroine of Mamoru Hosoda’s anime film Belle, whose look he designed. The idea for the brand started with his childhood love of Doraemon and the gadgets pulled from his four-dimensional pocket to change the everyday, a feeling Morinaga says he “wanted to give people through clothing, the thing that stays closest to us.”
The name of the label itself is a mash-up of “a real,” “unreal” and “age,” with the “AN” borrowed from the indefinite article, a detail Morinaga uses to suggest that the everyday and the extraordinary “sit just a little apart,” which tells you a lot about a brand that has spent two decades testing what clothes are able to do.
Now, the Tokyo label is marking its 25th Paris collection with JUST AN REALAGE, a retrospective that opened in Paris on October 1 alongside the unveiling of its Spring/Summer 2027 show, “SKIN,” in which garments built from scale-shaped pixels of electronic paper lost their color on the runway, turned to ash and then bloomed back into color. To celebrate the milestone, he teamed up with colette co-founder Sarah Andelman through her consultancy, Just An Idea.
At the heart of the exhibition is the “SHOP,” an A-to-Z concept curated by Andelman that gives every letter of the alphabet its own ANREALAGE object, from an apple and a candle to a set of dice and a BE@RBRICK. Daft Punk‘s Thomas Bangalter, who composed the scores for the brand’s SS26 and FW26 shows, is also releasing a limited-edition vinyl of both soundtracks.
Beyond the SHOP, looks spanning the brand’s 25 Paris collections turn slowly on a rotating platform. There are designs built like pages from a geometry textbook, including a jacket shaped into a perfect sphere and another that stands upright as a pyramid, and dresses woven with programmable LEDs, developed with Tokyo tech studio MPLUSPLUS, that once flickered through glitchy pixels and stained-glass patterns down the aisle of the American Cathedral in Paris.
Below, Morinaga and Andelman share more about the exhibition, Japanese design and the technological shifts that continue to inspire the brand.
Looking back across 25 collections, what do you still recognize from that early work, and what has changed the most significantly?
Morinaga: What hasn’t changed is that I am still trying to create the moment when clothing transforms on the runway. In 2014, at our first show in Paris, I had two models in white stand back to back under the light. Their clothes turned grey. When they stepped apart, only the places where their bodies had overlapped, where the shadow had fallen, remained white, as a trace. They were clothes that wore their own shadow. In “SKIN,” our twenty-fifth collection, the clothes lose their color on the runway and turn to ash. Then, on that same runway, the color returns. What I am doing has not changed since the first show.
What has changed is where technology and fashion stand in relation to each other. At the first show, fashion still lived inside technology. When we came to Paris, the material that changed color in light was the protagonist, and perhaps the clothes were only a vessel to show it. Now, I place technology inside fashion. “SKIN” uses electronic paper, but all that comes to the surface is the shape of the garment and the patterns that appear on it.
The sewing machine was once cutting-edge technology, too. No one calls it technology now. I think technology matures little by little as you keep using it. Ten years ago, the material that changed color in light could only be made with a cotton-like hand. Today, it can become fur, or velvet. Technology and chic, overlapping naturally within a single garment. After 25 collections, I feel I am finally coming close to that.
An alphabet is a strict rule to curate by. Why did you choose this creational approach, and which letters and collections were most exciting for you to ideate around?
Andelman: It was very playful to collaborate about this 26 objects by one letter. I thought some letters were going to be difficult like K, X, Z but finally we managed to find solutions for each of them. Some objects came very naturally like A for Apple because it always starts like this, Q like Quilt because it’s in the ANREALAGE DNA.
[For collections,] I think of the very special collaboration between ANREALAGE and DORAEMON for FW24 collection, it was so incredible to see these floating clothes-objects.
Looking back at your own archive, was there a look or moment that made you feel particularly nostalgic?
Morinaga: “REFLECT,” from 2016, brings back a lot of feeling. It was still a time of transition. The people who watched a fashion show with their own eyes and the people who watched it through a smartphone were just beginning to trade places. So, I thought: let me make clothes that only appear on a screen. Ten years later, fashion on the screen has become ordinary.
The other is the patchwork from 2014, when we first came to Paris, clothes that expressed light and shadow. I joined together two thousand small scraps of fabric. In “SKIN,” I made clothes from scale-shaped pieces of electronic paper, each thirty millimeters across, and called each one a “pixel.” One thousand to two thousand of them in a single garment. When I counted, it was almost the same number as the scraps of fabric back then. The origin of the pixel was patchwork, I only realized it after the collection was finished.
Colette always had a strong relationship with Japanese designers, and I’m curious how your sense of Japanese fashion has shifted since those early years, and where you’d place Anrealage within that longer story you’ve been watching?
Andelman: I’m a lover of Japan in general, and I’ve always been a big fan of Japanese brands like Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, sacai and Doublet. ANREALAGE remains in a special place because each collection has a theme and there’s always this unique balance between technology and craftsmanship.
I’m honored to contribute to this project as I have a huge respect for Morinaga-san and his brand ANREALAGE. I think it’s a nice moment to celebrate his 25th collection in Paris and visitors will be surprised to discover or re-discover his work.
What first made you think of clothing as a device for transforming the everyday?
Morinaga: I have loved science fiction since I was a child. Above all, I loved Fujiko F. Fujio’s Doraemon. Doraemon pulls secret gadgets out of his four-dimensional pocket and changes the everyday. Every time I saw that moment, I felt excited, my heart racing. I remember it vividly from when I was a boy. I wanted to give people that feeling through clothing, the thing that stays closest to us. That is why I started the brand.
The name ANREALAGE is made from A REAL (the everyday), UN REAL (the extraordinary) and AGE (time). But it is not the negating “UN.” It is “AN,” the indefinite article. The everyday and the extraordinary are not distant opposites. They sit just a little apart. A shadow cast by the blazing sun. A flower withering, its color fading. Changes so small we almost overlook them.
A white garment turns colourful when you step outside. The air around the people watching shifts, just a little. I think what captured my heart was not the garment itself, but the air that the garment changes.
Have your feelings about technology changed since 2003?
Morinaga: When I started, technology felt far away; it was a tool for making the everyday we overlook a little wondrous. Now, technology stands right beside us. I believe fashion and technology are, in truth, very compatible. The day their boundary disappears has already come. The “SKIN” show was an attempt to dress the body in the skin that lives inside the screen. Pixels of electronic paper change color one by one. And yet, after it has been rewritten, the color remains. It may look extraordinary today, but I don’t think the day this clothing becomes ordinary is very far away.
Clothing is one of the oldest technologies we have to communicate who we are. What do you think someone looking back at ANREALAGE in fifty years might understand about how we lived in this moment?
Morinaga: As time passes, what was ordinary stops being ordinary. Something once thought worthless may hold value a hundred years later. From the very beginning, the name ANREALAGE held that time within it: AGE.
Clothing is the first skin that humans made. Living creatures shed their skin, cast off the old and go on living. Perhaps it was by changing clothes that we learned how to shed. On screens today, clothes are called “skins.” You can take them off, and put them back on again and again. We are living between a body that will perish and a screen that never ends, moving back and forth between two skins.
Someone looking back in fifty years might be able to see that. An age when clothing began to change, from a second skin that protects the body into a skin that can be reborn. An age when we began to make clothes for the things that will remain on this earth far longer than a human life. I believe that someday, those clothes may be called a third skin.
