In that sense, extraORDINARY dovetails with a movement across the recent fashion shows in which designers embraced real, recognisable clothes and platformed individuality—soul, you could even call it—via their styling. “Quiet gestures hold so much more meaning than the louder gestures,” Bolton says. “Bravado—we should be looking at the opposite of that.”
He was drawn in particular to the Japanese designer Jun Takahashi’s fall 2024 Undercover collection, a sublimely moving show that was inspired by Wim Wenders’s contemplative film about the beauty of everyday life, Perfect Days, and included a spoken poem specially written for the occasion by the director about the daily rituals of a single mother, “Watching a Working Woman.” Garments from Takahashi’s collection—otherwise unremarkable pieces reworked via collage and layering techniques that rendered them anything but prosaic—will greet visitors at the entrance to “extraORDINARY.” They “give the exhibition a real human starting point,” Bolton says.
The show will close with the work of another Japanese designer, Anrealage’s Kunihiko Morinaga, whose “unfamiliar geometries” and “unexpected proportions” add a conceptual dimension to what is otherwise familiar. Rain parkas and trench coats as “objects of wonder.”
Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe, spring 2022 ready-to-wear
Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com
Moncler 1 by Pierpaolo Piccioli, fall 2019
Photo: Courtesy of Moncler
Helmut Lang, spring 1993. (Photo by Giovanni Giannoni/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images)
WWD/Getty Images
In between, Familiar Forms will look more closely at designers’ interventions of common items—Virgil Abloh’s Off-White t-shirts, Gianfranco Ferré’s demonstrative white shirts, trenches from Jonathan Anderson at Loewe and “the different designers at Burberry,” and puffer gowns from Pierpaolo Piccioli’s collections for Moncler, all of which, one way or another, “put the extra in the ordinary,” Bolton says.
“Common Matter,” meanwhile, will delve into the potential of throwaway materials and found objects as actual garments. Margiela will be prominent in this gallery, alongside other designers who have made a habit of repurposing materials. “A paper dress,” Bolton says, can demand as much skill and as much labour as a silk gown. And the cost of a material tells us very little about the craftsmanship required to transform it. Reuse and reconstruction run through the exhibition because I’m interested in how things acquire life and how that changes what we value and care for.”
