Chapter 4

Travel has always been my source of inspiration. Seeing new places, interacting with people and things that ignite my creative juices. Animated characters like Tsumori Chisato are my favourite. If you are still under the impression that clothing isn't fun you are yet to come across the work of the Tokyo-based fashion designer.

Tsumori Chisato Pre-Fall 2017

Her animated and expressive non-runway collection is literally colour in action. She is inspired by her surroundings and it shows in her work, which is one of the reasons I'm drawn to it. Her recent collection, was inspired by her travel to Cuba with maracas as her main motif in most of her pieces. The clothes are characteristically kooky with embroidered instruments, boasting mustaches and lips applied to a natural tweed suit and rows of rattles suspended between lace on a shirtdress. My favourite being the smile inducing raffia satchel.

She didn't let the Cuban surroundings distract her signature colour palette, it remains tight in all her pieces when she could have been tempted to use the now cliché Havana hues. Her Pre-Fall 2017 collection has Chisato's default register of youthful naiveté. There is simplicity in her patterns which attracts the young at heart that she has noted in one of her interviews that her most loyal customers aren't that young, hence her use of forgiving silhouettes - for every striped tube skirt, there's a colour-blocked tunic and crinkled palazzo pant.

You can definitely see the "Cha-cha-cha" that she has experienced. Let your work be your diary. An experience may be for a moment, but memory is for a lifetime.