When Alexandra Senes, who curates the biannual trends space at France’s most important fashion trade event Prêt à Porter Paris asked Five by Fifty to represent Tokyo at her event, we were stunned and excited.
Prêt à Porter Paris is one of the global fashion industry’s most important events. The 65,000-square-meter exhibition showcases more than 1,500 global fashion brands, runway shows and art installations and receives 45,000 visitors over four days.
Five hundred square meters of Prêt à Porter Paris is dedicated to an inspirational trends area called Explosion de Modes, a space displaying colors, fabrics and ideas.
The theme for Autumn-Winter 2010 is “New Generation Cities”, with Tokyo, Rio, Stockholm and Los Angeles as well as Paris selected by Explosion de Modes curator Alexandra Senes as the world’s new wave of urban influencers.
Five by Fifty set out to recreate Tokyo’s pulse and spirit to convey current consumer and societal trends within the parameters of an 80-square-meter space. Utilizing the five senses to create a contextual experience, we assembled a cast of collaborators to demonstrate the inspirational diversity and contradictions of the world’s most populous city. This was a challenging task but it felt logical to interpret what Tokyo meant through the five senses because it’s a city that touches each sense uniquely.
We collaborated with musicians Yasuharu Ohkouchi and Jeff Wichmann, film creator Stuart Ward and scent artist Kaori Oishi. We also transported tons of convenience store merchandise (drinks, snacks, cosmetics – all available only in Japan) to Paris to give visitors a tangible sense of consumerism and innovation in Tokyo today.
Within this sensory backdrop, we also decided to pick five areas of Tokyo we love and highlight these more intimately within our space; Aoyama, Jingumae, Nakameguro, Sarugakucho and Shimokitazawa.
We then visited a convenience store in each area and bought products that we thought represented each area’s characteristics and its demographics, and presented these items in huge, specially made ‘obento’ boxes at the show.
So imagine if you will: a backdrop featuring a movie, a soundtrack featuring Tokyo’s most unique sounds, scents specially created to demonstrate each of our chosen five area’s characteristics’, five big obento displays featuring cool items you would find in a typical Tokyo convenience store and even some snacks that people could try.
This is what Tokyo means to us:
“Tokyo is a paradox. It is both friendly yet alien, crazy but serious, modern yet traditional. It’s the world’s most populated city; a confusing neon jungle that overwhelms on arrival but on closer inspection offers calm shelters. If that sounds like a cliché, the paradox is that it’s true.
Tokyo’s sights, sounds and smells are a sensory overload. Its residents live in a state of apparent chaos yet there is organization to the mayhem. Tokyo is one of the world’s safest cities but its not run under dictatorial rules. Its inhabitants have intense social obligations to live by but there is also an overwhelming sense of playfulness and liberality to its culture.
Trying to describe and convey the spirit of Tokyo means discarding the rulebook. Its sheer vibrancy is always inspiring, sometimes strange but never dull. Living in Tokyo is a daily adventure, with little hope of unraveling its mysteries.
Tokyo has no core but is multi-layered. Each time a layer is torn away, a new one appears, as indefinite as the last.”
Nicole Fall
Trend Director
January 28, 2009
Read more in our ongoing Prêt à Porter coverage.
Five by Fifty was invited to Pret à Porter Paris by SAS, young trend agency orchestrated by Alexandra Senes.