Pauline Abascal & Kanako Kajihara

A Fine Arts graduate, Pauline Abascal works with Parisian fashion houses including Balenciaga, Isabel Marant and &other stories. She designs prints in her studio and develops textiles in European and Asian factories. She was a speaker at the 2011 Banshuori textile fair in Nishiwaki, on how the French luxury industry views Japanese textile.

Kanako Kajihara studied fashion and textile at the Royal College of Art in London. She founded KAJIHARA DESIGN STUDIO in Tokyo in 2008 and in 2013 received the Grand Prix du Jury PV Awards — Première Vision Paris. She works with Japanese houses on innovative and creative fabrics for European luxury brands.

Literally the “Ah-ness of things”, mono no aware could be translated as “empathy towards things” and is often associated with a feeling of transience and the melancholy this can inspire. The first part of the duo’s project was to jointly design a capsule collection of fabrics. In a second stage, Rozier and Kajihara made a documentary on the Japanese textile industry, filming factories and workshops, and examining workers’ relationship with their machines: a kind of industrial archaeology of Japanese fashion. In a word, study how fashion is made and how to make fashion using local means of production in a way that reflects a mono no aware mindset.

-1 ©K. Kajihara

-2 ©P. Abascal