This season, Yasuko Furuta gave it the razzle-dazzle—a quick skim through a rail of her clothes revealed some show-stopping sequins, frills, and shine. As is custom, though, the Toga designer’s commentary on her exuberant fall collection was short and sweet: she mentioned states of dress and undress, as well as the spirit of the 19th-century French Romanticists. (More specifically, Eugène Delacroix’s iconic painting, “Liberty Leading the People,” and the expressive strokes that allow its fabrics to fall off the body and flutter in the winds of revolutionary Paris.)
But once folded into Furuta’s topsy-turvy world, her references were anything but a history lesson. Take the tailoring, which began with fin-de-siècle suiting as its starting point (note the charming oversized ribbon bow ties), and then tugged its proportions in every direction to create unexpected looks for today’s urban dweller: a sleek black blazer cinched at the waist with an asymmetric oversized belt; a pair of silk trousers featuring explosions of ruffles along the thigh; paneled coats with pillow-like padding at the hem for added swish.
Typically, Furuta’s skills lie in her ability to apply just the right amount of restraint to her wilder flights of fancy, so it was fun to see her really swing for the fences this season. A brilliantly bonkers sky blue silk dress featured an enormous ruched cut-out at its center, playfully styled with a pair of black tailored trousers and an enormous black ribbon in the hair. Furuta’s wonky take on plaids saw them folded and stitched over into eye-popping patterns across an especially fabulous skirt. (And that’s without mentioning a kind of minimalist cowboy top made from sequins with fringing that swung from below the breasts.)
It was a reminder of all the chatter about the possibility of a new “Roaring Twenties” for fashion a few years back: that bolder, brasher mode of dressing that flickered up post-pandemic, then seemed to fizzle just as quickly, now usurped by the more commercial approach we’ve seen over the past few seasons as the specter of recession looms. (Furuta’s designs may be luxurious, but quiet they’re certainly not.) But her secret sauce, really, is the heart behind the clothes. She also cited Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, the tale of forbidden love memorably brought to life on screen by Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in Todd Haynes’s Carol, as an inspiration; more specifically, a sentence in which the protagonist muses on what makes a classic work of art, or film, or literature. It’s precisely that thoughtfulness and sensitivity that makes Furuta’s pieces modern classics of their own.
