Pillings Tokyo Fall 2023 Collection

When Ryota Murakami was eight years old growing up in Osaka, he showed up at school one day wearing a quirky wool sweater that his mother had lovingly knitted for him. “I was ridiculed for it,” he recalled backstage at his runway show, where he presented the knitwear he now designs himself under his brand Pillings. “Because of that trauma at school I became conscious of clothes, and I started designing so that I could maybe find some approval.”

This season, the now-34-year-old designer continued riffing on his childhood trauma with a collection that was about feeling like an outcast. You might assume a moth is a knitwear designer’s biggest enemy, for example, but for an eccentric like Murakami it represents a kindred spirit. After spending the past season feeling dejected about his work, Murakami found himself gazing up at the moths fluttering around under the street lamps of his neighborhood, thinking about the way they represent hope as they fly towards the light, even though they’re unpopular with people.

The idea manifested in moth-eaten holes that served as perversely appealing decorations on knitted slip dresses, or crochet iterations of the wool-hungry insects attached to vests and sweaters. Elsewhere, lines of music were stitched in intentionally messy threads across the chest (“a nod to people who are clumsy or out of tune”), and wide-legged wool trousers spooled at the ankles in a contemporary silhouette.

A graduate of Coconogacco (a school in Japan that encourages its students to push at the boundaries of their creativity), Murakami is good at twisting his pieces into new and inventive shapes, and going against the formulaic grain that knitwear usually adheres to. That inventiveness showed up in cableknit braids that went the ‘wrong’ way across cardigans, while small swatches of lace-knit detailing materialized in seemingly random areas on sweaters. The knits also incorporated pockets in unconventional places at the sides, which was why the models came out hugging themselves. It turned out to be a new way of looking at pocket functionality: “When you’re feeling anxious, you can put your hands in to calm down. I made them with the image of being wrapped in a blanket to protect yourself.”

Despite being rooted in what might be regarded as self-pity, Murakami’s work has a distinctly positive feel, and he’s onto something with his edgy, off-kilter knits. In a full circle moment following his show, Murakami appeared wearing a floral jumper that had also been knitted for him by his mother. This time though, he wasn’t met with any ridicule, only applause.