For the fourth consecutive season, Japanese brand Children of the discordance, which has debuted in Milan calendar in July 2020 on the occasion of Milan Digital Fashion Week edition, will present its collection at Milan Fashion Week in a digital format.
“It will be my fourth time at Milan Fashion Week. I have never had the chance to show in person in Milan, but I feel that the city is deeply meaningful to me. I look forward to promote once again Japanese hip-hop culture and our brand’s DNA through new means of expression of street culture” said Shikama Hideaki, Children of the discordance’s creative director.
The seasonal fashion film will be titled, as the collection, REASON, and will be directed once again by Keita Suzuki, already director of dawn and PROGRESS, the AW21 and SS22 fashion films produced by the brand. REASON will engage the audience with a new form of street culture inspired live performance. This season Japanese BMX professional riders will present an 80’s inspired collection in the streets of Tokyo.
“After skateboarding, hip hop music and street dance, a new chapter of my own background which deeply relates to Children of the discordance’s identity. This season, I looked back at the 80’s culture and expressed it in Children of the discordance’s own way. I had a strong desire to update and recreate something from that time. Those years represent the first ten years of my life. I was young, but the 80’s culture and music had such a deep influence on me. I only realised that much later and recently I thought back to “Reason”, the song by Zürich’s artist Maadrhino, which became an inspiration for this season”.
Titled. indeed, REASON, the new FW22 collection represents Shikama’s passion for the very simple act of producing fashion from vintage and crafting new pieces of clothing. “When I was asked why I make clothes, I would just say “because I love it”. I have been fascinated by making clothes for about the last 30 years. I enjoy fashion as my profession and as my vocation. Fashion is my reason. This season is inspired by fashion, the reason why I have lived try life this way”.
Liaising to the last winter collections, REASON will bring together diverse and apparently very distant references to pursue the designer’s perpetual quest toward new applications of vintage fabrics. AW22 will see dead stock fabrics and 80’s archive pieces updated with the latest technology and materials.
As in last seasons, the collection will bring forward Children of the discordance’s signature gradation of black and white and its experimentations on grey shades, ranging from charcoal grey to light grey. AW22 main foundation tones will be, though, represented by oatmeal and beige. Shades of powerful orange and red, AW22’s highlights, will bring strength to the wintery palette.
About: Children of the discordance
Children of the discordance starts in 2011 as a collective of three friends who, between hiphop and hard-core music, create a customised shirt, making the one and only piece never seen before and produce original patches and screen prints for original t-shirts.
In 2013, Children of the discordance , whose brand name acknowledges the resistance of the designer to conform with common fashion and music trends, becomes a solo project with Shikama Hideaki continuing on the brand on his own. The vintage bandanas appear first in 2014, used in small parts on the clothing, each with a distinct pattern to make each piece unique and with a unique impression.
Since the outset, Shikama has made use of fair-trade materials from EZLN in Mexico, Hirbawi Textile Factory in Palestina and Burkina Faso for his collections. Children of the discordance works with vanishing archives, taking the pieces apart, chopping them up and preserving the useable parts, and reconstructing into a wearable piece.
Today, Shikama sources bandanas from countries all over the world such as from USA, India, Pakistan, France and the Netherlands and uses around 20,000 pieces of bandanas in one year for production, combining them with his own graphics and original textile designs to continue creating the one and only product that expresses his and his creations’ discordance.
All images courtesy of Children of the Discordance
PR Agency UNCND