YOHEI OHNO Spring 2024 at Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo

YOHEI OHNO Spring 2024 at Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo entitled “NEW TOWN NEW CAR”

The starting point of the collection was my return home to research something nostalgic in my own memory, something local that I could not call stylish, and there I saw my childhood album for the first time with my family.

The overall feel of the YOHEI OHNO spring 2024 collection is the sports-inspired, but never in an athleisure, modern style, but rather in the attire of schoolboys and people living in rural areas.

Also, maybe because of the influence of having an older sister, my memories are a mixture of boy’s and girl’s belongings.

I write this because it is necessary to explain this collection, but family memories may not be very good ones.

I am a quiet person in my family, and it is still difficult to speak honestly about my feelings or thoughts.

Wanting to get away from my home, which was not comfortable, was one of the reasons I decided to go to Tokyo.

My hometown is in a residential area named “Tokadai New Town” in Aichi Prefecture. I was born and raised in the developed suburb where families move to seek a better life in a single house.

Since moving to Tokyo alone, more than 15 years ago, every time I returned to my hometown, I felt a sense of loss toward my hometown, which was gradually becoming desolate without any further development, irony toward the name “New Town,” and guilt toward myself for leaving my family there to live freely on my own.

Contrary to my own impression of family and hometown, however, what I saw in my childhood album was a happy, hopeful family photo, as if I had forgotten about them all this time. They looked like the ideal family envisioned by the early Heisei era, before we entered the “lost 30 years”.

I always think, “I want to create something that has a dream”. To me, a dream means something that can only be “incrementally” reached, but never arrived.

When I saw Tesla’s cybertruck for the first time, I thought it was a design that progressively moves toward some great human dream, and also I felt a connection with YOHEI OHNO’s creation.

It seemed to me that the scenery of hopeful family memories that I saw in the album was also a kind of dream that I would never get there again.

The only thing I could not find in the album was my father’s car, which must have been a memorable experience, as we went out and traveled in it. I could only vaguely recall my father’s car, which was supposed to symbolize our family life in the suburban “New Town”.

I wanted to use my father’s car as a metaphor for “personal memory” or “hope that is being lost”. In contrast, I wanted Tesla’s cybertruck to appear in the collection as a symbol of ” the human dream” or “a stylish future”.

They are not just opposites, but also like a keyword in YOHEI OHNO’s creations: ” A future that is far away is also a past that is far away”. A dream that can never be reached is like a beautiful past that cannot be regained.

I created this YOHEI OHNO Spring 2024 collection with a belief that the key to “creating something that has a dream” would be to face once again the memories of the past that I myself have turned away from, the hometown where I was born, the country of Japan in which I have little hope, the Heisei era in which I have lived, and above all, my family.