Sacai's spring/summer 2027 is where a reset becomes visible, and what Chitose Abe has moved is the way she assembles a look rather than the material that look is made of. Abe founded the house in Tokyo in 1999 and has signed every collection herself since, with no predecessor to answer to; she now returns to the women's catwalk in Paris after sitting out a season to put the brand in order. The house built its reputation on taking classic and military garments apart, and this season it goes for tailoring, hard-edged leather and a shoulder that holds its shape. The change shows in the clothes before it shows in the intentions.
Abe set out those intentions after the show, speaking in English. "I wanted to express the inner strength and vulnerability of humans," she said, adding that "a person's good parts can also be a little bad or rather, since it's all human, that's fine." The references, by contrast, sit almost entirely on the surface: the academic iconography of the college, with a "University of Sacai" logo and heraldic crests, the English motivational line "The moment of becoming", and the Latin maxim "Aut viam inveniam aut faciam", I shall find a way or make one, carried across the garments as prints.
WHAT STAYS, WHAT CHANGES
What stays is the hybridising of weights that is the house signature: denim, leather, heavy cottons and suiting set against chiffon, satin and organza, with asymmetric volumes piling up on one side of the body. What changes is the footing, because the collection is anchored in tailoring and in hard-edged leather and the looks come out structured; where deconstruction used to dominate, construction now does. The quantity of print is new as well. Prints do not carry comparable weight in Abe's vocabulary and here they are abundant: trompe l'oeil effects, cable-knit textures, feather patterns, photographic reproductions of metal objects and stones.
THE PROOF IN THE CLOTHES
Gold studs pack the shoulders, chest pockets and cuffs of a double-breasted jacket in glossy olive, worn over a skirt in the same cloth that opens below the knee into a gathered, panelled flounce, so that the tailoring stiffens without giving up volume. Straight tailored trousers with a pressed crease and an ankle hem recur throughout and anchor the looks with a columnar discipline, while rigid funnel collars and squared shoulders raise the upper body and hold it still.
Midway through, the hybridising of weights is still plain to see: a white denim gilet worn open over a sheer top, with a semi-transparent stole trimmed in feathers laid across one shoulder. Shortly afterwards comes a double-breasted jacket whose lapel has been removed and replaced by a layered high-necked construction, its sleeves semi-transparent and striped, over cargo trousers cut through with wide veiled inserts. Deconstruction has not disappeared, but it has stopped setting the rule.
Towards the finale the construction moves inside the garments instead of dismantling them. A white shirt with a concealed placket keeps its classic collar fastened and studded with three-dimensional stones and crystals that cascade down the chest; another top splits the body in two, with the placket and flap pocket of ordinary shirting on one side and a sculpture of oversized stones mounted on a ground printed with diamonds on the other. The real stone and the printed stone sit on the same garment, much as a grey ensemble puts sleeves in real cable knit alongside a smooth body carrying a printed cable. As the construction hardens, then, Abe leaves the surface to imitate what is made for real elsewhere on the clothes. The additive architecture is pushed as far as it goes in a ribbed jumper whose sleeves, built from panels and draped cloth, fall past the elbows and cover the hands, over tailored trousers with a centre crease.
The tailored discipline and the sculpted collars give the collection a grip the Sacai look did not have when it lived by subtraction. The sheer quantity of print and decorative appliqué, on the other hand, at times covers over the very contrast between tough and delicate cloth that remains the most recognisable thing about this house.
Sacai is one person's language, twenty-seven years without a change of hand, and nobody spoke it before Abe. The reset did not change who she is, it changed how rigid she is willing to be: structure holds deconstruction in place rather than repudiating it, because the hybrid proportions and the off-axis volumes are still there, mounted now inside a frame that did not previously carry the look. The house starts again from that harder grip.
