Sacai Fall 2023 Ready-to-Wear Collection

Since her return to the Paris runway after the pandemic lockdowns in Japan, Chitose Abe has been exploring a new formality. In the Before Times, colorful graphic prints and sport and/or utility motifs were reliably present in her collections. Post-Covid, she’s been using more black and white, and building her signature hybridized garments from dressier building blocks.

If it’s counterintuitive—the thinking being that Covid accelerated the casualization of fashion—it’s served to widen her design vocabulary. For fall, she didn’t really do much hybridizing at all. Instead, she “dissected” quite traditionally made garments and shifted them either to the side or up. Long slit skirts, for example, were sewn with a shoulder strap and patch pocket. Sling the strap over a shoulder and not only does the shape of the skirt change, but now you’ve got a bag, too. Quite utilitarian in the end.

Despite the non-stop talk about pantsuits, it’s been a banner season for skirts, and Abe had a range of options, including a fluted skirt saved from conformity by a number of vertical slashes (callbacks to the Interstellar references in her menswear, maybe) and more complex skirts that unwound around the legs, from the hips down to the ankles

On jackets, the slices Abe made were horizontal, which lifted the silhouette; rather than hitting at the hips, they were cropped above the waist. Basting stitches and trailing threads decorated a group of pieces at the end that included a dress coat version of those tiered jackets. The basting stitches are leftovers from the bonding process that holds two fabrics in place until they’re fused into one, and normally they’re removed from final garments. But Abe liked the look of them.

Challenging preconceived notions in design has always been Abe’s “kachikan,” meaning her priority or her value. Her instincts this season may have led her to the idea of elegance, but the conventional isn’t something she’s interested in.