Kartik Research, Masu and 032c Are Ones to Watch in Paris
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PARIS — With themes of friction, discomfort and radicalized shapes for an urban uniform, a trio of international designers from India, Japan and Germany are bringing challenging ideas to Paris Men’s Fashion Week for fall 2024.
Kartik Research
Less than a year after being shortlisted for the LVMH Prize, Indian designer Kartik Kumra is preparing to stage his first physical presentation in Paris with a fast-expanding label and a new name.
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Following a trademark challenge, the craft-focused menswear brand has changed its name to Kartik Research from Karu Research, but Kumra isn’t letting that glitch break his stride. He plans to open his first store in New Delhi next month, to be followed by an international location later this year.
And the fall collection he’s set to unveil on Sunday may include his first womenswear pieces, which the self-taught designer is soft-launching three years after founding his brand.
It’s all happening much faster than expected. When he applied to be included on the official Paris Fashion Week menswear calendar, Kumra thought he had “a five percent chance” of success.
“It’s crazy. I didn’t realize it was this much work,” he confessed with a laugh. “The idea of presenting and organizing something at this scale is something that I’ve just never done before. I never even been to a fashion show before, so it’s going to be kind of interesting.”
Though Kumra’s creations are labor intensive — his woven textiles require no electricity to produce thanks to the use of handlooms and natural dyes for the prints — he has an ambitious vision of creating an Indian heritage brand with global reach.
This season he’s also introducing a new aesthetic. “In the past, we leaned into this romantic side of India, this idea of India that doesn’t actually exist,” he said. “This time, I kind of wanted to include some element of friction, so there’s more military references. It’s a little bit more chaotic, but the traditional stuff is also there.”
Even though his name is now on the label, he plans to keep the spotlight on craft. “I’m not honestly that focused on it being autobiographical or about me. Our process is at the core of the brand, and that’s a collaborative thing with the artisans,” he said. “The intention with anything we do is not really to make a spectacle. It’s just [to] make good product.” — Joelle Diderich
Masu
For Tokyo-based designer Shinpei Goto, coming to Paris to show his work was an inevitable gauntlet. “It is the place where the best people gather and the biggest audience, just like the Olympics and the World Cup,” he told WWD ahead of his first show in the city.
Fashion is after all something he’s been gearing up toward from childhood, when he and his older brother would sneak into the closet of their chic grandmother, who was a painter, to snag a Gobelin weave jacket with shoulder pads or a patterned silk scarf to costume themselves while playing.
“From the age of 15, as I bought leather to make wallets and cut custom holes in jeans with a knife, I naturally began to think that I would become a fashion designer in the future,” said the designer, who went on to study at Tokyo’s Bunka Fashion College.
As a student job, Goto scored a spot at Laila, a well known vintage store with a huge cache of hard-to-find and collectible designer wares, where he was tasked with repairing and eventually remaking items. This experience gave him an appreciation for “clothes that can be a vintage for someone, loved beyond the times,” from their historical rooting to their materials and cuts.
This approach caught the eye of Masu owner Shoki, a Japan-based textile manufacturer, who appointed Goto designer for the brand in 2018.
Named after the “-masu” verb ending that denotes polite speech, the eight-year-old brand has 35 stockists in Japan and 10 doors internationally in South Korea, China, Taiwan and Canada. Its prices start at around 10,000 yen for simple tops and go up to 120,000 yen for outerwear, with trousers and knitwear averaging around 45,000 yen.
Goto’s work for Masu netted the brand the 2023 Fashion Prize of Tokyo, which is organized by the Japanese capital’s metropolitan government, and paved the way for its debut in Paris for fall 2024.
On Wednesday, the designer will present a fall collection that subverts usually somber ideas such as loneliness and bad weather.
“I want to affirm through my clothes that there is beauty in ordinary days, dirty things, ugly things, sad events, and even in the culture that has become obsolete,” he explained. “I am motivated to design by feelings of discomfort and anger in life. We transform that frustration into humor and kindness to assemble our collection.” — Lily Templeton
032c
Growing from its magazine and branded merch roots, 032c has morphed into a powerful cultural brand led by Berlin-based creative director Maria Koch.
The label launched men’s ready-to-wear at Pitti Uomo in 2018, followed by London Fashion Week that fall, and dipped its toe in the Paris pool with a garden presentation last season. Now it is prepping for its first runway show scheduled for Thursday.
Koch brings the minimalism of Jil Sander and the utilitarian ethos of Yeezy, brands for which she has worked and consulted, to the collection. Collaborations have included sneakers for Adidas and essentials bodywear for lingerie brand Sloggi as it has expanded from streetwear to a full lifestyle brand that she hopes can be an antidote to the industry’s overproduction and constant chasing of trends.
“The biggest ambition is really to create a nearly timeless urban uniform. It’s not so much about the season and you can’t really say if it’s from the past, the present or the future. It’s completely detached from the idea of time,” she said. “It’s my intellectual philosophy right now, that I’ve tried to answer for myself, and with this new collection.”
To achieve that, she looked to Romanian artist Victor Man’s “The Lines of Life” show at Frankfurt’s Städel Museum. Koch always begins a collection with color, instead of fabrics or silhouette, and Man’s muted brights formed the basis of this season. “So it’s quite moody,” she said of the palette, while the shapes are “radicalized.”
Koch swings on a pendulum between baggy, oversized styles and narrow, body-hugging silhouettes. This season she landed on the latter. “I’m into skinny jeans again, and the tailoring is quite sharp.”
Though she trained as a womenswear designer, the coed show will be about 60 percent men’s, all of which she has learned through experimentation over the seven years since the line launched. 032c opened its own atelier in 2022, with patternmakers and seamstresses on site.
With the increased attention, it has also been able to improve its suppliers, Koch said, and the quality of textiles and tailoring will make a big leap with this collection.
That, she hopes, will result in increased retail presence. Pieces from the brand are already carried in stalwarts such as Selfridges and KaDeWe, but Koch hopes they go deeper into the line’s full offering.
“It’s about the quality, of course, but I feel all these gimmicks in some lines have ended up with a cynical approach, and that isn’t something I’m aiming for at all,” she said. – Rhonda Richford
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