He's On The Hunt, He's After Hues: Fashion Pioneer Mines Colors In Central Park

Does Sunglow, Jonquil or Goldenrod dominate Central Park? Via.

In 2008 fashion and design pioneer Dai Fujiwara and his creative team took to the vast tropical lands of the Amazon to color hunt, matching thousands of cloth swatches with the surroundings to find the color palette they eventually used for the ISSEY MIYAKE Spring Summer 2009 collection. According to ColourLovers, "To test the veracity of their choices, they strung strips of cloths over open spaces like the river. If the colours 'melted away' and did not stand out from the background, they knew they had chosen the correct ones."

In contrast to what most would think to find in such a rich, vibrant rainforest, Fujiwara discovered that earth tones were the most common matches, and, surprisingly the rivers bent more towards skin tones. One wonders what Fujiwara will find this month when he goes on a color hunting expedition in Central Park, where the leaves are at the height of fall change.

Japan Society welcomes Fujiwara November 16 in Mastermind in Textile: An Evening with Dai Fujiwara. He’ll discuss his Central Park findings, his tenure with ISSEY MIYAKE, and The Sun House, his foray into eco-friendly architecture in the early 00s, featured in the ongoing Fiber Futures exhibit. Cara McCarty, Curatorial Director of Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum of the Smithsonian Institution and an art and design expert with over 25 years of experience, moderates.

Graduated from Tama Art University in 1994, Fujiwara joined fashion mogul Issey Miyake as a member of the design studio Paris branch a year later, and was appointed creative director in 2006. One of his biggest accomplishments was the award-winning and museum-featured A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) project where clothing meets craftwork. On huge rolls of special fabric, shirts, pants and the like can simply be cut out with a scissor and put on in a flash with customizations easily made when needed. In 2006 Fujiwara was named creative director of ISSEY MIYAKE. He left the position in 2011 to pursue his own projects.

--Sean Tomizawa

Fujiwara sayonara. Via.