kudos / soduk Spring Summer 2023 at Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo

Two brands whose names mirror each other–kudos and soduk–shared a single show space for their Spring/Summer 2023 collections, representing words and sentences homogeneously arranged in the show title.

The “kudos/soduk” show is based on a consistent attitude that doesn’t determine the gender of the clothes themselves, but rather on the natural crossover between collections created by a single designer.

The show also demonstrated the smooth relationship between soduk and kudos, which is rooted in the designer’s individuality, as kudos praises new values from a personal perspective, which brings about experimental change with a light deformity that embraces emotion, and soduk refines the ideas generated from kudos in pursuit of reality.

At the beginning of this season, tsukasa kudo referred to the “contradiction” that occurs between his mind and the outside world. While he refers to the friction between his mind and the various things that move forward and backward, oppressed by discipline, preconceptions, and time, He said that he believes “There is an optimistic appeal in everyday life, even if it is unsatisfying, in the imaginable tomorrow.”

For example, It is also tied to the inevitability of his renewed interest in Okinawa, his hometown and 50 years after its reversion to mainland Japan. His collaborative work with KOTA OKUDA on a brooch using fragments of Ryukyu glass, references and revivals of motifs, graphics, and moods found in decades-old photographs and documents that reveal old American influences, and mixes textiles made with traditional techniques with kudos graphics. Or, as he describes it, “kudos for soduk,” an attitude of “praise” is expressed through designs such as dresses using kudos fabrics.

A square stage raised just 10 cm above the ground, low lighting, guest chairs arranged in a regular pattern, and seats surrounding them. One such example is the zigzagging walk, as if sewed through the people, led by the two wedding looks that circled the stage where subject and object could be inverted like a mirror.

In the kudos collection, the encounter with the waterless digital printing technology (Kornit Digital) promotes a new approach to design, that expands the fabric as a starting point. While his basic approach of creating “change” through cutting, pattern making, and knitting is strongly evident in soduk, the distortion and wobble of classic patterns, or the almost vanishingly delicate lines and brushstrokes of drawings, are fully utilized in his simple master patterned shirts. The classic pattern distortion, waviness, or vanishingly fine lines and brushstrokes of drawing are fully realized in simple master-patterned shirts and tops garments. On the other hand, the willingness to work by hand in every finish was most symbolic of the runway scene.

“Another way of being” is imagined, and the idea, which is to replace the roles of multiple collars and armholes. Three-dimensional cutting, arbitrary cut-outs, and tailoring extensions that drape like sliding parts of a single garment are the basis shared by the two brands. Soduk has avoided exposing the skin unnecessarily, creates a space between the three-dimensional structure and the body, challenging the sensual gaze that is the main axis of kudos to be projected as a realistic form of womenswear.

As evidenced by the original poetic music by KID FRESINO, which was created in response to the designer’s mindset for this season, the presence of an arbitrary, personal perspective in design has the potential to shift the cramped reality into another story.

It is a consistent attitude that is linked to “LOST AND FOUND”(kudos AW22), in which he found freedom in rediscovering the past, and “tomorrow’s kids” (kudos AW17), the first collection for tsukasa kudo, in which he explored the landscape of an imaginary tomorrow.