Christian Dada’s A/W 2013 Collection ‘FENGHUANG’

For Tokyo’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week this year, Japanese designer Masanori Morikawa presented a series of looks, each more jarring than its predecessor, in a collection entitled FENGHUANG for his label Christian Dada.

It’s not everyday you get to see flashes of Rick Owens and Jeremy Scott in the same show, or same city for that matter, but that’s exactly who Morikawa seemed to be channeling with looks such as the gold lace over sheer shirt/short number atop crow-winged fur-covered dress shoes, or the denim-on-denim suit over crow-winged boots. Even the models had the classic ethereal Owens over-the-face hair.

While recognizable attributions to other designers’ work might read as a critique, the goth romanticism in Morikawa’s work and the successfully subtle androgynous styling (something many other designers still have not pulled off) culminate in an elevated and elegant line that is familiar, yet innovatively distant.