A million, million, million white hats. Akio Hirata retrospective exhibition

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

We are accustomed to the fact that at fashion exhibitions and shows, new, newly appeared items of clothing are presented, which have yet to become fashion in the near future. But in Tokyo recently opened retrospective exhibition seventies japanese fashion designer Akio Hirata, the concept of which was created by the art studio Nendo.

The song "A Million Scarlet Roses" tells about the love of an artist who, in order to achieve reciprocity from his beloved woman, strewn the street in front of her house with a million scarlet roses. Something similar can now be seen in Tokyo's Sprial Garden showroom, which is currently hosting a retrospective exhibition by Japanese fashion designer Akio Hirata.

True, this exhibition presents not a million scarlet roses, but four thousand white hats - the most famous creation of Akio Hirata, whose main period of creativity fell on the seventies of the twentieth century. And the goal of this exhibition is to achieve the love of not one particular person, but all visitors. Love for the work of the Japanese fashion designer of the past.

Each of the four thousand of these hats is handmade at the manufactory that produced the same headdresses in the seventies. Moreover, they are suspended in the exhibition hall without any system - in a completely random order, in completely random places at a completely random height above the floor level.

The main task that the guys from the Nendo art studio set themselves was to create a special space that conveys the atmosphere of the seventies of the twentieth century, their realities and fashion. Well, four thousand white (however, not only white) hats from Akio Hirata appear in this space as a kind of cloud through which light breaks through. Visitors to the exhibition can freely walk between them, look at the hats from below, from above, from the side. Everyone is free in their actions, because it was freedom in fashion that Hirata carried with her creativity.

The art studio Nendo itself, by the way, is already known to regular visitors of our site thanks to its advertising project Chair Garden, depicting chairs growing in pots.