Henry Darger, the art brut author and a lone artist portraying the artistic expressions of the endless deeds of human interactions led to the significance of the KIDILL 2022 AW collection. Designer Hiroaki Sueyasu feels that Henry had been living with both his feet set in reality and non-reality, living in the real world alongside with the insanity.
Henry was living in an unstable state, reality and unreality or normal with unusual, thus creating a unique balance of the conscious and the unconscious minds. The unexplainable mind of time, set aside from the mass state sided with Sueyasu’s suggestion of the environment and the present time framing deeply synchronizes with the creativity, solidarity, silence and the secrets he beholds. In the Realms of the unreal, composed with over 15,000 pages and hundreds of illustrations completed in 43 years, where 7 innocent girls goes on a rescue mission of children from the evil Grandelinia army , the battle of the Vivian girls holding male symbolism is where the main principle story lays in on this collection. With cooperation of Kiyoko Lerner, wife of Nathan Lerner, the founder of this Darger’s posthumous work, the icons portrayed in the fabrics and the graphics, and key palette of Darger’s characteristic of subdued purple and yellow defined in a vivid and psychedelic impression. The brands existing tailored items to collaborated knits and the grasp of KIDILL’s sexual ambiguity projected on the MA-1 and the dress shirts. As Sueyasu comments on the attitude in the root of Darger’s expressions“, The episode filled with violence, sexual oppression, crooked religious elements, the children grows in the vivid coloration of the blooming nature. Here I feel the duplicity of the piece of one man’s dissatisfaction, distress and solitude, perhaps the expression of being unconscious of these states”.
Through the collection Sueyasu honors the lifestyle of an outsider who acts on ones own faith without the influence of the social ideals and the existing framework. “Darger probably felt the urge in expressing the kingdom of the world of unreality, a clarification of a fantasy using his lifetime to express.” His creativity and drive to construct, the everlasting passion, or the creative process became an art therapy gently linked to KIDILL’s essential ideology of giving essential freedom in the creativity.
The struggle for the establishment for freedom is the principality of all the outsiders living in the present. Sueyasu is no exception. 2022AW collection with the re-edited runway show in Tokyo will be presented on January 18th on the Paris Fashion Week Online Platform.