White Mountaineering Spring 2024 Menswear Collection

Yosuke Aizawa recently became a professor back in Japan. He has been teaching fashion and textile design, and as he’s become a mentor, he’s once again found himself a student. This he discovered as he revisited the ’70s and ’80s, which, he said, are some of the best eras to delve into. “There is a lot of good design that combines the past and the future,” he said backstage at his spring show today. “It’s good design philosophy, and a good influence.”

He’s not wrong. The ’80s brought us the Memphis Group, Apple’s first Macintosh desktop, and even the Nintendo Entertainment System. All of which have, in different ways, significantly altered the way we engage with products and each other. But rather than fixate solely on aesthetics, Aizawa took the professorial route and also ruminated on the design approach of the time. This design philosophy of merging the retro with the contemporary and readymade, he said, is parallel to his own, which he described as an effort to merge the modern and metropolitan with the technical and functional.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the look that opened today’s show: Made with high-tech fabric, this two-piece suit cut with shrunken lapels and rounded sleeves was as dressed up as it was comfortable. Aizawa has a knack for maintaining the comfort and utility of technical fabrics without sacrificing aesthetics: See also his hybrids of dress jackets with gorpcore parkas, or his reinterpretations of traditional Japanese silhouettes in contemporary cuts.

But there was also an element of nostalgia here. Aizawa was born in the late ’70s, so his callbacks to the years he grew up in were less didactic and more personal. A definitive reference here was Back to the Future (1985) and the DeLorean, the time traveling car in the movie that he printed on the back of a jacket. There were also Memphis-esque prints in knits and colorblocked utility parkas in ’80s color tones, which playfully lifted the lineup.

The refreshing takeaway here was that you don’t need to wear athleisure in order to be comfortable. While much of fashion is currently preoccupied with dressing men up with jackets in place of hoodies and dress shoes in lieu of hype sneakers, Aizawa is concerned with how these clothes go with our lifestyles today and not the other way around. It’s good to see that the designer’s return to Paris last season has not diverted him from his resolve of making extremely wearable and functional, yet still desirable, clothes.