What catches the eye at theSakaki are their lookbooks. "It's better to have something funny, isn't it?" says Sakaki, and the Hyottoko character appears every season as an icon. Their debut collection, SS12, began with an impactful visual of Hyottoko standing in front of the National Diet Building. For AW14-15, they hired a model from Takakura-gumi, an entertainment agency that specializes in villains, which became a hot topic. The lookbook took on a life of its own, but Sakaki says, "It's only been six months." So what will SS15 bring?

"We're doing away with so-called lookbooks. We intend to make each photo enjoyable as a single photograph. Lookbooks tend to be like a kind of answer check, don't they? I don't think that's necessary anymore.
For example, when you see the 14-15 AW collection which uses a tough-looking actor, you wonder if they're trying to sell to that type of person. Conversely, if you use an androgynous person with narrow shoulders, even if they wear the same oversized clothes, the image will be feminine. We don't like that; we want to be free. It would be strange for the brand to impose an image on someone.
Rather than having a lookbook that is one photo in a collection that can be glanced at as a whole, we want to focus on one photo, and the photo that is used in that photo just so happens to be theSakaki. A single photo is like a painting or a trading card, or something like that.
But fashion visuals are taken with great care and disappear in six months, and only people interested in fashion look at older images. That's why I strive for quality that can be enjoyed at any time, every season. For SS15, my ideal would be to have someone suddenly pose a photo in front of me and say, "That's nice."

For AW12-13, he was photographed in front of a gold folding screen. He doesn't want to be pigeonholed into the idea of "Japanese," so for SS14, he used a foreign model for the first time. He collaborated with a black man and a Hyottoko doll. Regarding Japanese aesthetics, he nonchalantly states, "The way they're perceived changes depending on whether they're trendy or because I'm Japanese. I'm just doing it because I'm Japanese. I've always loved Japanese history, I've never lived outside of Japan, and there's still so much about Japan I don't know."

Continued from 3/5, "Making Gundam, Not Fashion."
Return to 1/5, "The Aesthetics of a Man Who Doesn't Want to Be Tethered."