‘Kitsuné – creating high quality new classics. A simple mix of sharp tailoring, cashmere knits, Japanese denim and jersey basics using traditional artisan factories.’ Or that’s at least how Kitsuné’s fashion founder, Masaya Kuroki would have us see it. Skinny school uniforms might describe it better, the kind you used to grow out of in under three months during the late 1970s and spill no end of bean juice down while scabbing the last 10 minutes of Magpie after jumping off the last school bus. Nice, practical pullovers. Nice knits. Nice bean juice. Nice, practical tits on Jenny Hanley.
Gildas Loaec set the whole thing up – he’s Daft Punk and Air’s manager and began the Kitsuné label a couple of years ago. The fashion thing came sometime later and now they have no end of swanky boutique stores in Paris, London and Japan and no end of soundbites either: ‘Instinctual designs following a back to basics philosophy.’ ‘Timeless essential pieces’. They ‘don’t look to create something new’ they endeavour to ‘to master the standards’ – which in laymen’s terms means you lift all your ideas from practical, functional items, piss about with them, make them a bit smaller and flog them back to a public that tossed something remarkably similar into the church jumble some twenty-five years before because they’d shrunk in the wash.
Which in a fairly labour intensive way leads me on to the music. There are certain things you just can’t better. That’s what they’re really getting at, isn’t it? What’s not broke you don’t fix? And although the jury might still be out on the brand’s skinny cashmere and the straight-legged denim, there’s no doubting the emphatically ace quality of its music, which gets showcased here on Maison Compilation 3, a bleep and bloop mish-mash of artificial intelligence, digital disco, scary rave, hot gossip and hyper-hip trans gender shenanigans giftwrapped in shiny, salacious packaging. Word up on Montreal’s Lovely Feathers – a cross between The Libertines and Rod, Jane and Freddy from Rainbow, cool, metallic Manc boys, The Whip, Simian Mobile Disco and Fox n ‘Wolf – a Swedisn group that smell each others’ crotches before going on stage to add a certain je ne sais quoi to the performance.
Are you up for some movin’ and groovin’? Watch my ass: das ist gut. Very gut.