Have you ever wondered why Japanese design is so damn good? Here is the answer – the Japanese do not differentiate between fine arts and design like we do in the West. They treat both the artist and the artisan equally. This is the way Tomoaki Okaniwa, the designer behind the young label The Viridi-Anne, thinks. Born in Nagano, he moved to Tokyo as a teenager to study oil painting, but then switched to fashion. He launched The Viridi-Anne in 2000. Clean tailoring prevails in Okaniwa’s work, but upon closer inspection subtle details like curved seams and seamlessly incorporated extra pockets give the clothes a sense of vitality that is not aggressive, but rather subdued. “The main concept of my work is based on the beauty of simplicity and the effects of time,” Okaniwa says. “I want to create garments with roots in the ideal of ‘wabi-sabi’ that incorporates the aesthetics of imperfection, incompleteness, and the effects of natural processes, but I want to mix it with a modern vision.“ Okaniwa’s clothes possess a good mix of European and Japanese cultures. His latest collection is based on Picasso’s Blue Period. We asked the designer to answer a few questions about his work.

How did you become a fashion designer?
I began my creative life as a painter. I was inspired by modern art in general, and one Japanese artist, Leonardo Fujita, in particular. He was an oil painter who lived and worked in Paris. His use of colors, fine sense of balance and choice of subjects were extremely beautiful.

Rag & Bone, the hip American clothier, was founded in Kentucky in 2002, at the beginning of the premium denim craze. The idea was simple, to make great jeans. The business took off quickly and in several years the company went from a manufacturer of good denim to a full-fledged clothing company with fashion shows on the New York calendar. Fast-forward to today and the company is going back to basics — pun intended. Rag & Bone recently introduced three new women’s lines, JEAN, SHIRT, and KNIT, that, according the press release, are supposed to “constitute the foundation of every modern girl’s wardrobe”.
    Last Friday, the new duds got a New York home of their own. The prime real estate on the corner of E. Houston and Elizabeth used to house Café Colonial, somewhat of a neighborhood landmark. Rag & Bone paid homage to the former tenant both implicitly — by keeping the original tile floors — and explicitly — by writing a love note on the side of the building. Inside, the no-frills wood and metal décor is in tune with the no-nonsense offerings. The modern girl gets three types of jeans (made in the USA), seven different tops (from the oxford to the shirt-dress), and several t-shirts. There is also an adjacent shoe store that houses footwear and accessories from the main line.

Rag & Bone, 73 East Houston St. New York, NY.

On a recent afternoon during the Paris menswear fashion week Stephan Schneider, the German fashion designer of the esteemed Antwerp school, was milling around his brightly lit showroom, talking to the buyers and eyeing over the models that were changing clothes like human jukeboxes. A soft-spoken man in his forties, Schneider has been working since the mid ’90s, gaining a loyal following among those who, although interested in fashion, would not be caught dead next to a fashionista. His clothes possess a quiet, quirky spirit that is easy to overlook, a spirit of a reflective kid who stands in the school hallway during the break watching other teenagers act out their lives. Acting is the last thing that comes to mind when looking at Schneider’s deceptively simple, almost preppy creations. “There is no drama in my clothes,” says Schneider.
     That is not to say that the clothes are not alive. The little details, such as different shades of color on the sleeves of a coat or a contrasting band peaking out from under the shirt’s collar, give Schneider’s garments their zest. “My customer is always a boy inside, even a man who is 70,” says Schneider. “The charm of my customer is that they can keep a boyish attitude inside, and that I want to keep in the clothes. There is always a bit of humor in them.”

On a pleasant afternoon last, January Damir Doma, the young fashion designer who works in Paris, sat at a long table in his boutique-cum-showroom located in a tiny alley of Le Marais, Paris’s fashion district. He looked content. His men’s show that took place the night before was well received and the nail-biting, repeated-click anxiety that every designer goes through after the show, has passed.
    The showroom was swarming with buyers from all over the world, and Doma’s assistants, all young and lanky, were busy filling out orders, chatting in half-a-dozen languages — I discerned French, English, Italian, and Russian. The courtyard served as a smoke-break gathering place and sandwiches were laid out for the hungry.
    Doma is a hot new name among the young fashion cognoscenti and his ethereal, monochromatic menswear has already been copied high and low. Last fall, as I was chatting with Susie Bubble, the famous English fashion blogger, one of her entourage broke in asking if my coat was by Doma (it wasn’t).
    Doma’s show, held at a parking garage, was a mob scene with hangers-on of all stripes trying to get inside to see what the designer cooked up this time.

Christian Boltanski, the French artist who works in various media, has always resisted all but the most abstract interpretations of his work. His new exhibit, titled No Man’s Land, on view at the Park Avenue Armory deals with “human identity, memory, and loss”, according to the press release. Still, I couldn’t avoid the overwhelming feeling that this impressive and grandiose installation, with its 60,000 pieces of discarded clothing, is about the Holocaust.
    The exhibition was held earlier this year in Paris, in the Grand Palais. But the glass ceiling and the Art Noveau cuteness of the space negated the poignant effect of the exhibit. The Armory’s vast Wade Thomson Drill Hall, with its industrially grim ceiling, is cold and uninviting, which suits No Man’s Land well. Boltanski is much more famous in Europe than in the US, and while I had to wait in the ticket line in Paris, at the Armory I had the entire exhibition just about all to myself, which added to the experience.
    Upon entering the hall the viewer is greeted by a tall, wide wall of rusted tin boxes, each randomly numbered and illuminated from above. This unwelcoming structure invokes the systematic nature of the Holocaust, where Jews were exterminated with machine-like efficiency.
    Rounding the wall, the visitor is surprised by the spaciousness of the gigantic hall, successfully juxtaposed against the claustrophobia of the tin box wall. Thirty tons of discarded clothing lay on the wooden floor in a grid.

Susan Sontag once said that an off-putting contemporary cultural phenomenon may become endearing with the passage of time. And while the ’50s Americana, conservative and conventional, has disconcerted many a person of liberal views, today its trappings have been adopted by a growing army of hipsters who would not touch suits and dress shirts, traditionally reserved for the gray Wall Street drones, with a ten foot pole just a decade ago. Freemans Sporting Club, the men’s Lower East Side store — pardon, a haberdashery! — has been instrumental in pushing this style, along with the nostalgic “hand-made-in-the-USA” tag.
    Nostalgia notwithstanding, we live in modern times, and so Freemans recently launched their website. Staying true to the brand image, the website is a carefully executed time-machine that transports you from today’s Williamsburg to the Suburb, USA of the yesteryear. The website features cheeky images of suburban pastoral in the Norman Rockwell style — here are a couple of Dads sipping beer around a lawnmower while a younger guy is working on his trusted motorcycle and there is another Dad taking his son fishing.
    The merchandise matches the image — three-piece suits hand made in Brooklyn, oxford shirts made in New Jersey (albeit from Japanese cotton) — all are timeless, as the website assures. And do not forget the jeans — raw indigo selvage denim, of course! All fine and dandy, but what would Allen Ginsberg say about flannel suits and the best minds of his generation?

Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the French director best known for his film Amelie is many things: the pride of the French cinema, the darling of film connoisseurs, a man with a clear and unique creative vision. What he is not, contrary to what many film buffs may think, is a highfalutin artist that lives in a parallel universe where low-grade pop-culture is not allowed to enter.
     At 56 Jeunet has enjoyed both artistic and popular success. His first two features, Delicatessen (1991) and The City of Lost Children (1995), produced with his collaborator, Marc Caro, were well-received by film critics and went on to become cult hits. The eccentricity of both pictures, the off-kilter characters, the unique cinematographic style, and incredible attention to detail quickly became Jeunet’s signature.
     On a recent afternoon in New York I sat down with Jeunet to talk about his career, his most recent film, Micmacs, and Rambo. The Tribeca Film Festival, where Micmacs premiered, just ended and Jeunet looked a bit tired, but his inquisitive blue eyes were sharp and alert. Naturally, our conversation turned to his unique aesthetic vision. The hallmark of Jeunet’s talent is his ability to create a world that is distinctly his own. In this world, the strange freely interacts with the familiar, turning the viewer into an Alice tumbling down a rabbit-hole.

Shirin Neshat, the Iranian-American visual artist, has had an exiguous but rewarding career. Her body of work, mostly engaging the position of women vis-à-vis Islam, is scant but forceful. The new book, Shirin Neshat (Rizzoli, $75), is an ambitious effort to gather her art under one roof. The 272-page volume documents all of Neshat’s projects with photographs and stills from her videos and her first feature film, Women Without Men.
    Neshat’s first undertaking, a series of photograph’s called The Women of Allah, remains her most poignant work. The photos depict Iranian women shrouded in veils and holding guns. Farsi poetry, including songs about martyrdom and sexual longing, is inscribed on their faces, hands, and feet. From Neshat, whose work is banned in Iran, one would expect a pointed critique of Islamist extremism, but the viewer doesn’t quite get that. The women don’t look like victims.
    The rest of Neshat’s work is less ambivalent. The book is full of stills from her videos depicting separation of sexes and limitations of women’s personal freedom. The book culminates with stills from Women Without Men. The film deals with oppression of women in Iran. It is based on the eponymous novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, about four women who are betrayed by the society in which they live. The photos in the book succeed in freezing the characters’ complex emotions and revealing their suffering. These silent and abandoned women surely find a sympathetic voice in Neshat, whose work remains urgent and charged.

When creative fashion designers such as Yohji Yamamoto or Raf Simons want to try their hand at creating sunglasses, they call on Simon Jablon, the owner of the London-based eyewear brand Linda Farrow. The company boasts an unparalleled heritage. It was established in 1970 by Jablon’s mother, whose name the line carries today. Linda Farrow started out as a fashion designer, before realizing that she could approach eyewear the way designers approach fashion, putting a creative spin on a quotidian product. The London scene quickly caught onto her quirky designs, and Farrow became their go-to brand for sunglasses. Remember those famous wraparound shades that Yoko Ono wore in her photos from the ’70s? They were Linda Farrow.
    The company was successful through the ’80s and then slowly drifted out of sight. It wasn’t until Jablon stumbled upon Farrow’s archive that a light bulb went off in his head. Thus, the company was resurrected. “What makes the company unique,” Jablon said when we caught up at Pitti Uomo in Florence, “is that there was never any business plan behind restarting it. As a child I could never quite grasp my mother’s achievement because you don’t think about your parents in terms of their career. The whole thing happened by chance. One day I was helping out my father, who asked me to clean out our family warehouse. So, I went over there to go through my mother’s stuff. There were boxes upon boxes of samples, and only after handling the eyeglasses I realized that I stumbled upon a treasure.”

Somewhere along the line luxury became a dirty word, and Karl Marx had probably less to do with it than Tom Ford. Contemporary consumer culture now champions oversexed logo-ed bling over subdued elegance. But there exist designers who aim to produce garments that are neither cocaine cocktail dress or the power suit. Rather, they are interested in making clothes that are real, not role-play, while conserving artisanal techniques that are slowly fading away as mass-production gains speed.
    Lost & Found, a small fashion company whose design studio is hidden in the Tuscan countryside, was founded by Ria Dunn, a Canadian expat, in order to produce clothes based on the organic relationship between the maker and his craft. According to a statement on her website, “This intimate work is designed and made entirely in Italy and is produced by the old hands of those still carrying with them the spirit of ‘hand made’ craftsmanship.”
    This intimacy is evident in the men’s and women’s garments Dunn produces, from carefully selected natural materials, such as cashmeres and wools interwoven with hemp and linen fibers, down to hand-finished stitching. The results feel earthy and organic. The textures are neither overly soft nor rough. This combination lured Karlo Steel, the buyer from Atelier, to Lost & Found.