Matohu: How Pottery Becomes Clothes
Hiroyuki Horihata and Makiko Sekiguchi, the design duo Matohu, make some curious clothes. Their most recent collection was inspired by Oribe pottery, an eccentric style that flourished for 20 years in the 17th century and then fell out of fashion. Perhaps, it is thought, because it was a little over the top. Oribe, associated with the tea master Furuta Oribe, is characterized by bold, abstracted designs, splashes of copper-green glaze and playful shapes (resembling fans, or even people). It left an impression on the Horihata: “To me this pottery is very modern.” Indeed, the striking, asymmetrical designs and clever, boundary-pushing forms do bear a certain resemblance to Western art of the early 20th century. “We wanted to put something of the story of Oribe in each piece,” he explained, showing me items from the spring/summer 2010 collection rich in copper green or bearing geometrical and abstract prints. The off-tilt, original silhouettes are also a homage to the avant-garde form of pottery.
While the spirit may be lifted from another era, the collection itself is very modern; cutting-edge actually. Matohu works extensively with craftspeople around Japan to develop new fabric making techniques. Horihata points me to a cardigan made from a web-like knit of 60% washi paper and 40% cotton and a long coat making use of a stop-thread weaving technique that works in accents of nine different colors at random. The latter, a testament to the patience of the craftsman, took six months to create.
The brand name Matohu draws meaning from the Japanese word matou (纏う), which means to wear clothes, “in such a way that it creates an atmosphere of beauty, like the motion of wrapping your body,” according to the designers. Might we also say that clothing can be considered a glaze for the body?
