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| A golden creation made from hand-crafted glazed ceramic catches the light at Yuima Nakazato's haute couture presentation in Paris. Photograph above and masthead by Elli Ioannou for DAM |
For Yuima Nakazato's Spring/Summer 2025 haute
couture collection in Paris, he turned his gaze to the vast and surreal
White Desert of Egypt, a landscape where time is carved into the earth itself.
Titled Fade, the Japanese designer's new work is a meditation on transformation, memory, and the
passage of time, both in nature and within the urban landscapes of the future, writes Jeanne-Marie Cilento. Photography by Elli Ioannou and Andrea Heinsohn
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A dramatic, crocheted design at the Paris SS25 show. Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn |
WITH an atmospheric soundscape of wind and waves and a golden sand dune at the heart of the runway, Yuima Nakazato's presentation of his new collection was an immersive experience that took the audience into another world, far away from the hurly burly of Paris outside.
Drawing inspiration from his travels to Sahara el Beyda,
where colossal chalk formations stand like frozen waves sculpted by millennia
of wind. Nakazato sought to merge the ephemeral and the eternal in his new designs, to embody the idea of weathering, how materials, ideas, and histories fade, dissolve, and are reborn.
Once submerged beneath an ancient ocean, this vast expanse of chalky rock formations tells a story that spans millions of years. Towering natural sculptures, shaped by relentless wind and sand, stand as ghostly sentinels of a forgotten seabed.
"The collection was inspired by my travel to the Sahara Desert where I did
a shoot and we got lost on the trip," the designer explained in an interview after the Paris show. Amid the phantasmagoric terrain, Nakazato confronted the idea of impermanence. He imagined the layers of history embedded in these rock formations, silent testimony to the forces of nature.
But inspiration struck not only in the stark beauty of the landscape; it emerged from Nakazato’s car losing the way in the desert, drifting through an abyss of darkness without GPS, reality and imagination began to blur. Memories, myths, and fleeting visions fused into a single, overwhelming experience.
The collection translates abstract ideas into vividly rendered couture, merging poetry, craftsmanship and innovation to create designs that feel unearthed from a dreamscape |
A hand-crafted creation worn with Nakazato's sculptural jewellery. Photograph: Elli Ioannou |
"All night we
travelled in the car and couldn't find our way, but I let my imagination merge with what was happening," he said. "We drove for hours and while I was sitting in the back, covered in dust, my mind went to the ancient Japanese myth of the giant creature
Namazu who lives under the earth.
"The desert, shifting and morphing under the night sky, felt like a living entity, an echo of this legend. What if the landscape itself was breathing? What if the White Desert was not only a relic of the past but a premonition of the future? I thought that seeing how today's weather can transform our environment the desert
might be foreshadowing the future of cities like Tokyo."
The title Fade encapsulates Nakazato’s contemplation of
gradual disappearance: of landforms shaped by time, of cities transformed by
climate change, of personal memories dissolving like sand in the wind. The
collection translates these abstract ideas into vividly rendered couture, merging poetry, craftsmanship with innovation to create designs that feel
unearthed from a dreamscape.
Nakazato has long been known for his innovative approach to couture, often weaving together avant-garde materials and new technology. This season, however, marked a distinct evolution. The emphasis was no longer solely on the technical, but on the human: a meditation on the erosion of time, the fading of memories, and the delicate balance between the present and future. The designer’s experience of getting lost in the desert, cut off from the digital world, became an allegory for the disorientation of modernity where big cities feel as transient as shifting sands.
This season the emphasis was no longer solely on the technical, but on the human: a meditation on the erosion of time, the fading of memories, and the delicate balance between the present and future
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Designer Yuima Nakazato puts his glimmering design on a model during his show in Paris. Photograph; Elli Ioannou |
The collection's diaphanous, layered silhouettes in shades of ivory and sand, evoke the attrition of desert rock formations. Voluminous tunics and draped coats, crafted from gossamer-thin fabrics, move like ever shifting dunes. Long, flowing capes feature delicate, hand-painted motifs reminiscent of wind-sculpted landscapes. Intricate pleating and deconstructed kimono elements create a sense of movement and impermanence.
The hand-crocheted pieces seem like organic structures shaped by unseen forces. The standout piece of the collection (at left) is an all-ceramic golden dress, which needed more than a thousand hours
of work, each of its two thousand ceramic components individually crafted, glazed,
and threaded by hand: a testament to the Nakazato's’s unwavering dedication to couture as an art form.
"The golden ceramic dress I made that is not going to ‘fade' ~ it is going to exist for 10,000 years,' Nakazato said. "But other textiles will
disappear with a much shorter life. So the comparison with a long life and a shorter one is what I am trying to show together. This is what I really wanted to
do this season."
Throughout the collection, colours deepen into
ochres, charcoals, and oxidized metallics, reflecting the desert at twilight. A
striking structured jacket, embroidered with ceramic shards, captures the
tension between fragility and endurance. Capacious trousers with sculptural
folds mirror the mushroom-like rock formations Nakazato encountered in the
White Desert. A series of sheer, iridescent gowns, woven on vintage kimono
looms, shimmer like mirages, their surfaces shifting under the runway lights.
Sustainability remains central to Nakazato’s vision and this collection incorporates upcycled textiles from Africa, transformed, regenerated and rewoven into new forms.
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Voluminous fabrics connected the collection to the traditional clothes worn in the Sahara. Photograph: Elli Ioannou |
Sustainability remains central to Nakazato’s vision. The
collection incorporates upcycled textiles recovered from Africa, transformed
through a process, which
allows fibres to be regenerated and rewoven into new forms. Handcraft remains
at the core, with pieces like the intricate crochet ensemble requiring some five hundred hours of meticulous work.
Textile innovation, a cornerstone of Nakazato’s work,
reached new heights. The collection employed vintage looms from Japanese
kimono-making traditions, while experimental fabrics integrated both ancient
craftsmanship and futuristic materials. Spiber Inc.'s Brewed Protein™ fibres,
derived from sustainable bioengineering, were seamlessly blended with
traditional Japanese lacquer techniques. Digital printing and AI-enhanced photo
processing allowed for designs that felt simultaneously ancient and avant-garde: a
visual language where past and present coalesced.
Since debuting at Paris Haute Couture Week as an official guest designer in 2016, Yuima Nakazato has pushed the boundaries of fashion. Beyond the runway, Nakazato has left a mark in
other creative fields. In 2024, the Cité de la Dentelle et de la Mode in
Calais, France, dedicated its first monographic exhibition to his work: Yuima Nakazato: Beyond Couture. Also last year, his documentary film Dust to Dust won the Human/Nature Award, a prize for those offering solutions to environmental crises. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Nakazato's costume designs
have been highlights of productions at the Boston Ballet and the Geneva National Theatre,
further demonstrating his ability to translate his aesthetic across
disciplines.
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Shimmering like mirages, iridescent designs were made on vintage Kimono looms Photograph: Andrea Heinsohn |
With the new collection
Fade, Yuima Nakazato has ushered in another era not
just for his own label, but for couture itself. In a world increasingly defined
by rapid change, his collection serves as both a reflection and a warning.
It
asks us to consider what is vanishing before our eyes and what might be reclaimed. A vision where nature and technology, memory and innovation merge into a singular, poetic expression of couture. The shimmering, ceramic-embellished gold creation, left the audience with a
lingering impression, one not just of beauty, but of something deeper, more
profound.
