Some people might think it is inappropriate, even sacrilegious, to employ high-end fabrics in a non-high-end way. You would not take silk gazar, for example, and turn them into casual clothes, even if there’s no rule against such a use, except perhaps aesthetic consideration. For Sacai’s Chitose Abe, there are no such self-imposed limitations. She uses fabrics as artists use paint; she mixes them up. In doing so, she gives some of the oldest cloths new purpose. For autumn/winter 2017, tweed, a traditional Irish/Scottish fabric in use before the 19th century, for example, in her hands were fashioned into outers so type-breaking they made Chanel jackets look rather frumpy.

Sacai is known for her aesthetic hybrids, and the results often defy characterisation. For her recent show, she crossbred high-brow tweed with outdoor wear and the result is deliciousness only skilled mixologists can offer. How does one describe her not-country-club tweeds? It’s tricky, but we’ll try. One of them that we really like is a navy and green parka-meets-anorak, within which bouclé tweed was worked into (top). Not quite what you might pick for a climb in the mountains, but it’s certainly for tranquil days tending to your resort in the Swiss Alps.

And would you add openings to tweed skirts the way they create slits in the knees of jeans? Ms Abe knows women like gashes in their bottoms, and she obliged, but these were not mindless rips, calculated to titillate, or repulse. Instead, they’re side openings with zips, which means the skirts could be customized to fall in a certain way, based on how zipped up they are, or not. The same idea was applied to pants. Yes, those pants! They have the attitude of a pair of cotton cargos and the swagger of the nicest wool crepe slacks. But they are in tweed!

Her cross-breeding does not only bring disparate garments from different categories of clothing together, which she frequently does, but also within a dress type or style. Take military wear, for (another) example. Ms Abe is fond of the field jacket, but this time, she’s created something that looks like the navy and the armed forces happily co-exist: a peacoat married to a parka!

From the start of the Sacai show, we saw designs that took into consideration the femininity women will always return to despite the vagaries of fashion or the gender-ambiguous leanings of street style. Case in point: the first look should really have been pyjama dressing except that the composition—cut, fabric, and embellishment—looked destined for a front-row seat of a fashion show than under a comforter in a bedroom, or, for the more adventurous, a bar-side stool in a pub. If Grace Coddington was really bent on wearing pyjamas to the Met Gala of 2015 (China: Through the Looking Glass), she really should have picked something like this.

What we find so inspiring is that Ms Abe is able to project a vestige of cool without sacrificing the advantage of craft, beauty, humour, intelligence, and modesty. Her clothes are not overt in any of those qualities that make the wearer ooze sex or trickle foolishness. Despite the possibly frenetic mixing within just one garment, each piece is a charming confluence of clever design and palatable novelty.

At one time, there were rumours that Chitose Abe was asked to go to Dior. If only it were true.

Photos: indigital.tv