Masu’s Shinpei Goto is a serial rulebreaker. This season the Japanese designer took Ivy League style—a faction of menswear fraught with sartorial regulations—and reinterpreted it in his own playful way.
“The rules of Ivy Style are so strict and regimented, it feels like a taboo to touch them,” he said after the show. He’d called the collection Grayish Tale, imagining it as a gray area where those aforementioned taboos could be broken, and gender norms could be bent.
This meant repp ties were worn not knotted at the neck but trailed rakishly from the waist, striped rugby jerseys were reinterpreted as preppy popcorn tops, and argyle appeared subversively on sheer sweaters and a bomber jacket. Feminine flourishes came in the rippling tartan maxi skirts, nylon jackets sewn with subtly ruched sleeves, sparkly skater sneakers, and ballerina shoes with baby pink ribbons tied around the ankles. Ivy appeared literally, too, on a fun leather jacket painted with the plant.
Goto intended it partly as an homage to the late Kensuke Ishizu, a bygone taboo-breaker himself who is credited with bringing Ivy Style to Japan in the 1950s with his brand VAN JAC (with which Masu collaborated on some of the sweaters this season), thereby invigorating an interest in fashion among Japanese men that lives on today.
Behind the theme was an accomplished collection of clothing that was both freshly creative and commercially viable. Goto has some influential backers behind him—the show was financed partly by Rakuten’s ‘by R’ initiative that supports emerging designers—and with each season he is establishing Masu more and more as a brand that will define the next generation of menswear coming out of Japan.
Flouting the rules one last time for the finale, Goto came out onto the runway riding a bicycle, waving to the applauding crowd as he led his army of models out onto the Paris streets as “You Get What You Give” by New Radicals thumped over the sound system. The production staff started quietly freaking out—He wasn’t supposed to go all the way outside! We don’t have a permit for that!—but Goto pedaled off with a satisfied grin on his face. He didn’t look back.
