Mina Perhonen

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Grace of design*sponge recently posted a chair designed by Akira Minagawa for his brand Mina Perhonen. Since discovering Mina Perhonen in Phaidon’s Sample a year ago, Minagawa’s work has inspired me. While I don’t design clothes, I can learn so much from Minagawa’s way of building a brand-wide story by using each product as a chapter.

According to Phaidon, Minagawa doesn’t follow fashion’s seasonal cycle treadmill, believing that garments produced for a specific season in a specific year will become “useless junk” (Tsuzuki 2005). His approach to fashion design is similar to (ethical) product design in that he strives to create durable pieces, both in terms of their construction and trend-independent aesthetic merit, that can be worn for many years. He works with local dressmakers to manufacture his garments.

Perhonen means “butterfly” in Finnish, and seems an appropriate mascot for the brand as a whole because of the butterfly’s airy, feminine, and natural qualities (Minä comes from Minagawa). My first impression of Minagawa’s work was that it stood in opposition to the FRUiTS-style ultra-cute, constructed, and somewhat jaded look that’s associated with Japanese street fashion. His designs are feminine, young, and perhaps cute as well, but in a substantially different way. There’s a thoughtfulness and restraint that seems to inform each of his garments, expressed through a quiet appreciation for materials, careful use of color, and respect for potential wearers. Minagawa’s use of patterns and sketchy embellishments makes his garments youthful and light, but he completely avoids the irony often associated with child-like graphics on clothes for adults. His cuts and hemming make some of his designs almost too precious.

Mina Perhonen looks each seem to evoke the border between two seasons and emphasize the fluidity of one season changing into another. This skirt, jacket, and turtleneck seem to illustrate the end of summer.

The long sleeves of the jacket and shirt and weight of the materials keep the wearer just warm enough during the onset of autumn. The jacket can be worn or left off, and the sleeves of the turtleneck are easily rolled up. The skirt’s olive-green color and vertical line pattern immediately remind me of late-summer grass. The turtleneck is patterned with solid polygons that suggest the changing colors of leaves that will soon fall or have already fallen on this grass; the leaf-shapes are positioned as if they were lying on a flat plane rather than attached to branches, and the turtleneck itself is positioned above the skirt, just as leaves form a layer over browning grass as they fall. The jacket is smooth and white, strongly representing the first snow that will cover the fallen leaves, which already cover the grass. As the temperature cools, the owner of this outfit will first wear the turtleneck with the sleeves rolled up, then down, and finally covered by the white jacket.

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