You can usually tell a lot about a man by the clothes he wears, but not if Koki Enomoto has anything to do with it. The Attachment designer makes it his business to remove any predictable or cliché details from his menswear and attempts to render something harder to define. Clean tailoring; sharp lines; total restraint.
Take the MA1 bomber jacket this season—which isn’t really an MA1 at all. The zip still slides up the tricep, but pockets and ribbing are eliminated so that it no longer telegraphs standard-issue military wear, but instead offers a kind of sartorial carte blanche. “The key for me is not to plant unnecessary information on the person who wears it,” said the designer during a preview at his Tokyo showroom.
Clothing is visual language whichever way you slice it, but in an era where we’re all expected to brand, brand, brand ourselves into oblivion with what we wear, say, or post online, the proposal to shrug it all off is tantalizing. What if your clothing didn’t give away endless information about you? What if you don’t want to wear the cerulean sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room? It’s an impossible idea to execute fully, but you only had to feel the sumptuous cashmere blousons or slip on the shirts made from fine Suvin cotton to understand: These are clothes that serve the wearer, not the algorithm.
Enomoto also had some fun furnishing the collection with personal touches in the silver hardware, taking the square case of his Rolex Cellini watch as a reference for the buckles that glinted on belted trousers and jacket ties; ditto the scarf rings, which were a nod to the interlocking silver Tiffany band that Enomoto wears on his pinky finger. “I wanted to incorporate some of my own individuality directly into the clothes. These are my personal little ‘attachments,’ things that are part of my daily life,” he explained.
That trivia likely won’t reach the people who end up buying Enomoto’s clothes (unless they read this review first), but that’s hardly the point. Instead, it’s the suggestion of humanity they impart, and the generosity of spirit. “Attachment can perhaps appear cold, but behind that I’m trying to create an image that is as warm as human skin,” he said. A too-literal translation there, but one that sums up what Attachment is about, and how Enomoto is evolving it. In absence, abundance.