BEHIND THE SCENES WITH AYA DESIGN

We caught up with Neo Yamaguchi and the AYA Design team about their SS27 collection, 'The Beautiful and the Sublime'.

With AYA’s Beautiful and Sublime collection launch at London Fashion Week, we went behind the scenes of the film shoot and spoke with designer Mineo Yamaguchi about the ideas behind the brand, the collection and what it means to create in an increasingly digital world.

At the heart of AYA is its factory. The brand works directly with Japan’s regional industries, bringing traditional craft skills into its avant-garde tailoring. It is an approach that looks backwards as much as it looks forwards as they find new possibilities in techniques and knowledge that already exist. As Yamaguchi puts it: “The past stands before the future.”

A designer, researcher and entrepreneur, Yamaguchi has worked with international fashion companies including Comme des Garçons. His practice moves between fashion, art, architecture and research, drawing on Japanese aesthetics while looking outward to the history of Western design.

For Yamaguchi, AYA’s identity comes from a distinctly Japanese sensibility. The brand draws on wabi-sabi, Japanese avant-garde and deconstructive fashion, alongside a more instinctive approach to art and design, one that allows nature and materials to speak for themselves. He describes this quality as “primitive”.

“By ‘primitive’ I mean the Japanese aesthetic of letting nature and material speak for themselves — a lineage you can trace through Shinto, Ise Jingu, the tea vessels of Sen no Rikyū, and Léonard Foujita. And because Japan is an island nation, it has traded without ever being invaded, absorbing many cultures with a kind of omnivorous appetite. The research into Japanese art I did for my MFA is the backbone of this thinking.”

The Collection

The collection began with what Yamaguchi describes as a feeling of unease about the direction of contemporary life. As data, efficiency and AI become increasingly embedded in the way we work and think, he began questioning what this might mean for our understanding of beauty and human judgement.

“It began with a sense of unease I feel in everyday life — toward liberal thinking and toward the increasingly lopsided evolution of AI. In society and in daily life, logic and structure are prized so highly that we seem to be losing our capacity for pure judgement. The bias toward data, numbers, efficiency and rationalisation is unmistakable.”

That tension between the rational and the instinctive runs through the collection. Across the pieces, Yamaguchi brings together different craft traditions and materials, creating a dialogue between cultures and ways of making. When asked if there was one garment he was particularly excited to share, he had this to say:

“Every piece. The inspiration at the core of this creation is distributed in balance across all of them. I would single out the tailored jacket and skirt made in khadi — the traditional Indian cloth woven entirely by hand, without machinery. They bring a new Eastern rhythm to the collection.”

Advice for Emerging Designers

Perhaps fittingly, Yamaguchi’s advice to emerging designers comes back to the same idea of resisting perfection. Having built AYA through experimentation, setbacks and trial and error, he believes that moving forward can be more valuable than waiting for everything to be right.

“I haven't yet built a record impressive enough to be giving anyone advice. Fashion is in an age of oversupply, and I am still in the middle of trial and error myself. I've been defrauded, too. This industry in particular is full of bad actors who prey on the dreams of young creators. But the one thing I'm glad I did was to act faster than anyone else — rather than chasing perfection, or hesitating out of fear of failure. I hope that's of some use.”