T Magazine: How a Rei Kawakubo Disciple Is Using All-Black Clothing to Make Something New
The fashion designer Kei Ninomiya discusses coming up at Comme des Garçons and his new project with Moncler.
Photograph by Robert Nethery. Styled by Malina Joseph Gilchrist
The color black has been a source of fascination for countless fashion designers (Coco Chanel and Rei Kawakubo among them), but few have plumbed its inky depths as completely as Kei Ninomiya. The 34-year-old Japanese designer and former Comme des Garçons pattern cutter has created tutus from shadowy pleated tulle, jackets out of tiny charcoal pillow pieces and dresses from studded jet black faux leather. He even named his brand, Noir Kei Ninomiya, after the darkest of shades.
“First of all, it’s beautiful, it’s my favorite color,” Ninomiya, who wears his hair in a tall mohawk, explains over Skype from his Tokyo studio. He says that restricting his color palette primarily to black enables him to focus on the development of his punk yet purist take on clothing. “One of the key concepts of my label is to bring about something new. In order to emphasize that newness, I thought it was important to have constraints.” His designs are known for extraordinary silhouettes that push the boundaries of form, proportion and production; they’re all intricately engineered with little to no sewing at all. “I thought we needed to explore new ways and techniques of production,” he says of his quietly revolutionary “no sewing” approach, which relies on clever techniques such as the use of small studs or metal rings to attach fabrics.
Ninomiya grew up on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands, and later studied fashion at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. But he left the school to join Kawakubo’s brand Comme des Garçons in 2008. “I always thought Rei was the best, so I told myself, ‘If I start working, it should be for her,’” he explains. Working under Kawakubo, he developed an appreciation for her uncompromising and groundbreaking approach. “The philosophy of Rei is always to introduce something new that we haven’t seen before,” says Ninomiya, recalling his mentor’s striking fall 2012 collection, which reinvented traditional couture silhouettes as flat, two-dimensional pieces that resembled paper doll dresses.
After four years of working together, Kawakubo encouraged Ninomiya to go it alone. He started showing his seasonal collections in her Paris headquarters — under the umbrella of the Comme des Garçons brand but with his own label. During fall 2018 fashion week in March, he presented his first runway show, at the Faculté de Pharmacie de Paris, where his all-black creations — diamond-stitched, cropped-leather biker jackets and voluminous hooped knitted dresses — were paired with outlandishly beautiful floral masks by the flower artist Makoto Azuma.
Despite his rising profile, Ninomiya steadfastly shuns the spotlight; he prefers to let his craftsmanship take center stage. He has no interest in taking inspiration from mood boards or fictional muses. Instead, using unloved materials such as polyester and pleather as his starting point, he often develops new construction techniques in order to achieve his aim of “surprising other people and surprising myself.” For Ninomiya’s fall 2018 collection, he crafted blooms from layers of scrunched-up tulle and organza and attached them to grids that blossomed like bouquets out of his surreally beautiful parade of dresses, coats and biker jackets.
His flair for innovation and keen attention to detail caught the eye of Remo Ruffini, chief executive of the Italian luxury brand Moncler, who invited Ninomiya to contribute to his inaugural Moncler Genius collaboration series, which launched at Milan Fashion Week in February. Ninomiya’s collection for the project will be released on July 25, the second of eight monthly capsule collections from designers including Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino, Simone Rocha and Craig Green. Ninomiya’s offering showcases his skill with fabric manipulation; he has created intricately futuristic coats, wraps and skirts with Moncler’s signature down and leather. “Kei represents the quintessence of craftsmanship, and his sense of experimentation is really outstanding,” Ruffini says of his decision to team up with the designer. “It was a rare opportunity to work with these highly functional lightweight fabrics,” says Ninomiya, who is more accustomed to dealing in materials such as jacquard and faux fur than the high-performance technical materials for which Moncler is known. “It gave me an opportunity to learn.”
A second collaboration with Moncler is already in the works, and Ninomiya continues to develop his own line within the house of Comme des Garçons, where the name of the game is seeing endless possibilities. “Every time, I start anew,” Ninomiya says. “I like to do exactly the opposite from what I did last time.”
