UNIQLO Redefines Innerwear with Mame Kurogouchi. Sensual, elegant, and fluid, the collaboration that embraces a woman’s freedom and fluidity through clothing.
For their latest LifeWear release, UNIQLO collaborates with Japanese clothing brand, Mame Kurogouchi on a collection that redefines womens’ innerwear. This collection includes an array of tops, bottoms, and innerwear, all clad in deep earthy tones that are chosen carefully to complement its wearers, no matter their skin tone. “The collection that has simple yet carefully considered cuts, accentuates the beauty of a rich feminine nuance,” says UNIQLO in a statement.
If you’re not familiar with the name, Mame Kurogouchi is a Japanese brand designed by Maiko Kurogouchi. The womenswear brand is known for its sensual yet minimalist artistry and refined care for details in each collection. They seek inspiration from daily life and the women around them, making their designs highly relatable and also the right amount of elegance, which is probably why their pieces are sought after. Their designs usually consist of neutral tones, boxy silhouettes, and figure-accentuating pieces, giving their pieces an element of feminine futurism that’s constantly seen throughout different collections.
Image courtesy of UNIQLO.
“At Mame Kurogouchi we always begin with textile creation, meaning the design process is a long one from start to finish. I place great value on the clothes-making process, the road a garment takes from its design stages to the moment it lands in the customer’s hands,” says Maiko Kurogouchi in an interview with UNIQLO, “Working with the UNIQLO design team, I was moved to find they shared a similar philosophy, approaching each garment from textile creation to the final touches with a researcher’s mind. In this collaboration, my hope was to enhance the natural beauty that lies within every woman. I was thrilled to share the discoveries and joys with the UNIQLO team as we worked to reach the same goal.”
The goal of the collaboration was to create a collection that was as comfortable as it was empowering. The two wanted to break the norm that women’s innerwear is restricting, thus the creation of pieces that embraces the body and allows women to move freely. The collection uses a selection of UNIQLO’s textile technology to further enhance comfort for its wearers.
Image courtesy of UNIQLO.
In this collaboration, UNIQLO uses AIRism cotton, a textile that combines the light and soft feeling of AIRism with the luminosity of cotton. The collection also uses UNIQLO’s 3D knit technology that allows the seamless creation of knitwear pieces like their ribbed jumpers and trousers. The seamless quality of this technology allows Mame Kurogouchi to design pieces with extra fluidity, hugging the curves of its’ wearers in the best way possible. As Maiko Kurogouchi says, “There are no straight lines on a woman’s body. My hope is to create clothes that land softly on the curves and enhance the figure.”
The collection blurs the line between what’s innerwear and what’s not, allowing the wearers to layer and style these pieces however they’d like. Starting on the 18th of June, this collaboration will be available in stores. (Text Vanya Harapan)