FRESH PRINCE

Serious artist and pop designer Yasuhiro Mihara astounds critics and fans in a new collection that channels the bittersweet elements of The Little Prince


Mihara Yasuhiro unwittingly drags his reputation around like excess baggage. A celebrated artist whose work was exhibited at the 53rd Venice Biennale, he is even more famous for designing shoes for Puma as well as hip urban clothes and accessories for his own label. But at Puma, Mihara also launched a book replete with illustrations that recall woodblock prints on four Japanese artists who have inspired his designs for the label. And each season, he launches collections richly inspired by nomads, literary characters and social phenomena – heady stuff for a designer who traces his roots and initial successes from sneakers and streetwear.
His tendency to mix highbrow and lowbrow manifested itself early. The Kyushu Island native famously brought gravitas to anything he touched, an extension perhaps of his art school grounding. While studying at Tama Art University in Tokyo, from where he would graduate in 1997, he designed a range of sneakers under his self-named label that he eventually sold at the store he called Sosu, Japanese for prime number, which he launched the following year.

Puma may have delivered a new and wider audience for Mihara but he was already a streetwear design superstar even before his first collection for the label came out in 2000. For his international debut, Mihara elected to show at the Pitti Immagine Uomo in Florence. He has already shown his collections twice in Paris and once in Milan and for which he has earned cachet as a designer. And while he has repeatedly displayed dexterity in tailoring with military jackets and suits, he continues to create asymmetrical clothes with drapes, flaps and underpinning deconstruction that easily turn a lad into a dandy.

So there, at every turn, just when you thought you have him pigeonholed and labelled, Mihara magically appears elsewhere doing something totally different. He does not delight – and this you realise when you meet him in person – in double identities or crossing styles, pop and high art, commerce and culture. For all intents and purposes, he sees these transitions as natural. “I don’t think of art and fashion as two different areas; they require the same production (method). I feel the same way when I’m creating art as when I’m designing clothes. The only difference perhaps is that people discard clothes but not artwork,” he says.
But his opinion may change now that a growing number of fashion fanatics collect his clothes and archive them as if they were art pieces. “When I was a boy, we took a field trip to a museum, the first time I saw so many artworks in one place. But what struck me was the ‘Do not touch’ signs placed all over the place. I thought to myself, why should such things, if they are beautiful and important, be kept out of reach?”

His latest collection uses Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince as inspiration. He presented it in Singapore, his first show ever after five years of working with Club 21. The collection has very strong pieces in delicate fabrics and spare details that emphasize the oversized silhouettes that conform to the body. It is a romantic interpretation in dark, muted hues. “The story of the Little Prince is very inspiring especially with all the gloom in the world. The Little Prince is looking up at a dark sky but what he notices is the bright star.”