Acne Studios Fall/Winter 2020

Juergen Teller's signature tool is the Contax G2, a 35mm autofocus rangefinder that Kyocera released in 1996 with Zeiss-made lenses. When asked directly about his gear, Teller answered simply, "Contax G2, with a flash on top," and that flash-lit, unpolished look became one of the defining aesthetics of 1990s and 2000s fashion photography. It's an easy camera to mix up with other cult objects from the same collector world, and the Olympus O-Product is a genuinely tempting wrong answer: a 1988 limited edition of just 20,000 units, designed by Naoki Sakai, with a boxy aluminum body built around a circle-and-square motif and zero manual controls, closer to a design object than a working photographer's tool. Teller's camera is the opposite of that, a real workhorse with interchangeable lenses that he leaned on for decades of campaigns, and Kyocera shut down the entire Contax line in 2005, meaning the camera behind some of the era's most recognizable fashion imagery has been out of production for two decades.

Shibori dates back at least to 8th-century Japan, with surviving dyed textiles from 756 CE among the treasures gifted to the Tōdai-ji temple, and it developed into more than 100 distinct binding and folding methods in the village of Arimatsu alone during the Edo period. It's often confused with two other Japanese textile traditions that get grouped in with it culturally but work completely differently: sashiko, a decorative running stitch originally used to reinforce worn fabric, and boro, the practice of patching and layering old cloth into new, mended garments. Neither involves resist-dyeing at all.

The technique's most direct link to contemporary high fashion is Suzusan, founded in Düsseldorf in 2008 by Hiroyuki Murase, the fifth generation of a family that has run a shibori workshop in Arimatsu since the early 1900s. Murase originally left Japan wanting to be an artist, and it was only from Europe that he recognized how significant, and how endangered, his family's craft actually was. He taught himself the techniques his family had preserved for generations and built a genuinely new brand around them, applying centuries-old binding and dyeing methods to materials like cashmere and alpaca rather than traditional kimono silk. Suzusan has shown at Paris Fashion Week since 2012, supplied shibori-dyed fabric to Christian Dior, and collaborated directly with Yohji Yamamoto, carrying a regional Japanese craft most people have never heard of onto some of fashion's biggest runways.

Fun facts:

The oldest written reference to anything resembling shibori is even older than the surviving textiles: a 3rd-century Chinese document describes Japan's Queen Himiko gifting "spotted cloth" to a Chinese emperor.

Arimatsu, the town Suzusan's techniques come from, once had over 100 distinct named shibori methods in active use, developed by different family workshops along the old Tokaido road connecting Kyoto and Tokyo.

Stephen Burrows developed the lettuce-edge hem in 1972 after a sample maker accidentally overstretched a hem on a matte jersey dress, producing an unplanned wave effect. Rather than treat it as an error, Burrows recognized its potential and refined it, eventually partnering with Jasco Fabrics to source a lighter chiffon matte jersey that let the stretch ripple properly. The technique became one of his signatures just as his career was about to hit its biggest moment: the 1973 "Battle of Versailles," a fundraising fashion show at the Palace of Versailles that pitted five French couture houses (Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, Ungaro, Givenchy, Cardin) against five Americans (Halston, Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass, Anne Klein, and Burrows). Burrows was the youngest designer on either side and the only Black designer in the show, and his unstructured, dance-influenced clothing, styled to music by muses like Pat Cleveland and Bethann Hardison, stood in sharp contrast to restrictive Parisian couture. Yves Saint Laurent himself reportedly called Burrows "the American designer" afterward. The lettuce hem has outlived the moment: designers including Marc Jacobs and Christopher John Rogers have referenced it directly in later collections.