SEVESKIG & (un)decided SS24 at Rakuten Fashion Week Tokyo

The title “IF WE BREAK DOWN THE WALLS,” chosen by Takeshi Nagano, designer for SEVESKIG & (un)decided, for their Spring/Summer 2024 collection, poignantly indicates a shift in his thoughts on the increasingly complex wars towards something more straightforward and pure. “What if we could eliminate the many physical and psychological barriers causing conflicts and divisions among the same ethnicity? Perhaps then, a light would appear at the end?”

Nagano, who has always drawn creative inspiration from indigenous beliefs such as prophecies, myths, and urban legends, finds his way to Slavic folklore and myths. He ties elements seen in traditional Slavic attire like gathers, shirring, floral embroidery, and cross-stitch with his own origins in American casual style (AmeKaji).

For instance, the inner landscapes of people wounded by conflicts have been transformed into grunge-style items, like jeans frayed and punctured by laser cuts, and biker jackets made from leather whose surface pigment has been chemically stripped away.

Each piece of floral embroidery, scattered as though repairing torn fabric, is akin to a word of prayer from him.

Dialogue with AI to explore the boundary between reality and fiction has also become an indispensable design technique for the brand SEVESKIG and (un)decided into SS24 collection.

He boldly incorporated misleading outputs from ChatGPT and generated images of flowers using Midjourney.

Imaginary gods convincingly narrated by AI, like “a god with a tiger’s head” or “a witch in a red leopard’s fur,” are materialized through collaborations with nipoaloha and TOLQ, like tiger-print Aloha shirts and leopard-print coach jackets and Sukajans (embroidered jackets).

Items with stripe and border patterns serve as metaphors for walls and boundaries that divide people. But, in this collection, even those are fraying away visible in the knitwear featuring pan-Slavic colors of red, blue, and white morphing into fringes, and even in an Imabari towel set-up that includes the ironic phrase “NO BORDER NO HUMAN,” which itself seems to fray and disappear along with the border pattern. This could be said to embody the strong message Nagano has poured into this collection.

Additionally, this SEVESKIG & (un)decided SS24 season features a collaboration with the anime “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” producing items like printed T-shirts. Materials resembling the barrier “A.T. Field (Absolute Terror Field)” that appears in the series developed by weaving flat nylon yarns also appear in the runway show.