March 1, 2020 |
A Noir a show is pure theatre. It transports you from a rainy Paris morning to a place of wild imaginings. Kei Ninomiya’s starting point is always the colour black (hence the brand’s name). This season was a meditation on gradations of the colour red, which when combined result in black. Red means roses. Nature is a recurring theme for Ninomiya, whose shows resemble a parade of human/plant hybrids. His women were covered head-to-toe in red feather or tulle petals and looked like they’d been consumed by carnivorous roses. Others wore black outfits quivering with spiralling golden wires. One model was enveloped in a fantastical Afro hair sculpture. Another wore a swinging caged crinolines covered in red curly wigs. They were created in collaboration with the Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, better known as Shoplifter, who makes immersive art pieces entirely from synthetic hair. The fantasy levels are high at Noir. The creativity is off the scale.
Photographs by Jason Lloyd-Evans.
