Tomo Koizumi's fairytale couture

Steaming volumes, clouds of frills, skillful use of color: that's the secret to success for Tomo Koizumi, the Japanese designer who has seen his following grow exponentially, so much so that he went from showing his creations from Tokyo's Coconogacco School to New York Fashion Week to Marc Jacobs' shop in a matter of months. «For me, beauty is harmony,» the designer told us when we met him at Dolce&Gabbana's historic offices on Via Goldoni, where he was sewing the final details of his new collection. Thank you to the patronage of the two designers, Koizumi's fairytale couture is coming to Italy for the first time. This is the result of a collaboration and support project that has in the past involved Miss Sohee and the enfant prodige of British fashion Matty Bovan. «When this initiative was proposed to me, I immediately accepted because it's a great opportunity to perform with such support in Milan, one of the most important fashion capitals.»

The Japanese romanticism of Koizumi and the Italian sexiness of Dolce&Gabbana seem like two far-flung realities, but their shared penchant for bold choices, eccentric prints, and daring combinations is evident in the ruffled dresses, corsets, and majolica-print pumps. Koizumi's aesthetic is instantly recognizable thanks to the constant use of ruffles sewn together to create true wearable sculptures, ethereal and imposing garments, both in monochrome and glossy colors and through color scales, a legacy of his art studies. «I draw a lot of inspiration from the 40s, 50s, and 60s and the couture of Cristobal Balenciaga, but also from the 90s and 2000s, such as Dolce & Gabbana's archive models. Then I mix different inspirations with elements of traditional Japanese culture, like the kabuki, the kimono, and the traditional clothing of the emperors.» His Japanese roots permeate and bundle a wide range of inspirations, especially in the choice of shades: «For this collection, I chose many colors traditionally used in Japanese kimonos, I took inspiration from an old book. When I design a dress, I want it to stand out but still be balanced, because you can use a very bright color but also combine it with an unsaturated color to create a balance, in this, you can see the influence of Japanese culture.»

The exaggerated volume of the dresses is achieved by unfolding scraps of fabric and joining them together, vacuum-packing everything to transport kilometers of fabric in a handy little bag, and then using steam to open the ruffles: «polyester, the Japanese one, because Japanese synthetic fabric is of really good quality and also has more than 190 colors». The result is a couture of yesterday, theatrical dresses enriched with ribbons and corsets in a riot of fabrics, a parallel universe reminiscent of the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, almost a lucid dream. «I like working by hand, it's like making art, like sculpture. I think that's why my clothes look different from others. I dream of clothes with more and more volume.»