This season, Yasuko Furuta of Toga wanted to take things back to basics. (Well, as basic as a brand like Toga—beloved for its subversive, endlessly customizable riffs on wardrobe staples—can get.) Her starting point was a 30-minute video she stumbled across on YouTube: an interview with Claes Oldenburg, the late great Swedish American Pop Art sculptor best known for his pieces that take quotidian objects—spoons, shuttlecocks, Swiss Army knives—and blows them up to a monumental scale. “It was very interesting to me,” Furuta said at a preview earlier this week, noting that she was especially taken with Oldenburg’s half-melted, upside-down ice cream cones. “He always focuses on something very simple and ordinary, but looks at it in a new way. To me, it’s a punk attitude.” Even if, for Furuta, the end product of adopting this line of thinking couldn’t look more different, it’s not hard to see why she found a sense of philosophical kinship there.
In fact, that’s pretty much Furuta’s secret sauce: her ability to take an item of clothing you’ve seen thousands of times before and recast it in an entirely new light. For instance, the crisp white button-downs that you might already have a few of in your closet, which she transformed by slicing her way through the sleeves and rolling them up to form gentle puffs of fabric around the shoulder. Or the blouses and skirts in retro prints of cactus plants and flowers that looked like ’50s housewife pinafores after being whizzed up in a blender, with detachable ruffles and collars. Or a lovely slip dress made from wide layers of quietly clashing white and cream silks that could be buttoned wonkily around the waist to create the effect, in the designer’s words, of a woman “halfway through getting dressed”—both cheeky and sensual, as is Furuta’s way.
Her show today was staged in a first-floor room at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, a complex of conference halls in the heart of London’s seat of power, with the floor-to-ceiling windows and Brutalist concrete pillars framing views of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. It provided a suitably stark backdrop to appreciate the craftsmanship of pieces like a sharp-shouldered top cut from a thick floral jacquard or a flouncy crinoline-boned miniskirt. And, as always, accessories were a highlight, whether the leather wedges inspired by Japanese athletic plimsolls, or the knitted shopping bags encased in Perspex bags for practicality, or the vast array of joyous charms and jewelry created with everything from marble to coral and attached to military-style shoulder panels on knits or dangling from the handles of those shoppers.
It comes off the back of a busy few weeks for Furuta. She just launched a buzzy set of sneakers with Asics through a series of events in Japan, and she’s gearing up for a collaboration with NTS Radio, a cult East London alternative-music station that Furuta is a particular fan of, often tuning in while making her breakfast in Tokyo. (There was a taster in this collection, courtesy of a football-style tee featuring the NTS logo alongside her beloved rose motif for Toga.) It’s a testament to Furuta’s strength of vision that she can take all these disparate projects—and, more generally, the eclecticism of the clothes on her runway—and weave them together to create something that always feels authentically, unmistakably her.