Sacai: A Manifesto of Rhythm
This season, Sacai halts the male form that flows from top to bottom. It draws a line through its middle. The waist is no longer a point of transition but a field of intervention. Trousers do not merge with the skirt — they negotiate with it. Jackets are split in two, yet they do not fall apart. If anything, they stand more resolutely. Muhammad Ali’s fist is not a nostalgic detail. It sets a direction. You become what you think. What Abe does is not shout. It is to shift the structure out of place. Freedom here is not a drifting idea. It is hidden in the seam allowance. “To destroy and to deconstruct in order to create.”
In the language of fashion, this sentence often reads like a dramatic gesture. But at Sacai the point is not gesture; it is method. Deconstruction here does not mean falling apart; it means revealing how the structure is built. A jacket cut horizontally, trousers joined to a skirt, a new line drawn through the middle of the silhouette… None of this is there to shock, but to break habit.
Liberation begins precisely here. For convention is often invisible, like that one-directional silhouette flowing from shoulder to hem. As long as you don’t touch it, it goes unnoticed. What Abe does is split the silhouette at the middle, opening a third space between north and south. The intervention is as mental as it is aesthetic.
To destroy here is not to wreck, but to make room. Deconstruction is not subtraction but a practice of rebuilding. Freedom emerges not as a romantic slogan but within tailoring itself — in the seam allowance, on that fine line where the pattern breaks. And perhaps the most radical thing is this: this freedom is not uncontrolled. It is measured, cut, deliberate. For anyone who truly wants to create must first know what they are breaking.
Even though it was Sunday morning, the music started hard. There was no soft opening. When the first beat hit, the room pulled itself together. In that moment I understood: this was not a background, but an intervention.
When Freddie Mercury’s cry of “I want to break free” fell into the room, a light ripple of laughter went round, but no one relaxed. Those words were not nostalgic; they were timeless. They sounded not like a pop reference but like a demand. The transitions that followed were darker. The rhythm was fragmented. Like stitching. A tempo that moved in cuts. Michel Gaubert, who built the soundtrack, was the collection’s invisible tailor. The music here did not create atmosphere; it cut through the structure.
The music did what the silhouette did. It did not flow straight. It broke and was rebuilt. One moment it rose, then it left a void. In those voids, the horizontal cuts of the jackets stood out more sharply. The trouser/skirt hybrid walked with greater resolve.
When Tears for Fears played, the words felt almost ironic: “Everybody wants to rule the world.” Yet here the point was not to rule but to shift the boundary. Not a display of power, but a redefinition of control. Gaubert did not let the sound flow straight; he divided it, left gaps, built it up again.
For me, that morning, the music was the most honest part of the collection. It did not shout. But it did not retreat either. Just as Sacai does: freedom here was not a romantic cry, but a resolve hidden within the rhythm.