Capsule Wardrobes – Vestoj

Life In Colour: Red, Blue, Green and Yellow

Alice Hines — Thu, 11 May 2017 10:01:05 +0000

Takaharu and Yui Tezuka. Photograph by Yutaka Obara.

This article is the first in a series of interviews about dressing in monochrome.

ON THE FRONT OF Tezuka Architecture’s catalogue of work, the names of the firm’s principals, Takaharu and Yui, are written in contrasting colours: blue and red. Recently, I spoke to them in their home in Tokyo, Japan, via video call. It was a warm spring evening here, in New York City, and a bright morning there. As it happened, they were similarly arranged: Takaharu, on the left, in his signature cobalt, and Yui, on the right, in a cherry shirt that that looked plucked from the primary colour wheel.

Yui and Takaharu’s designs feature almost no colour. One project, the Roof House, is all sandy wood, topped with a sloping gray roof (each family member has a personal skylight, through which to ascend to the outdoor space). Their ‘Wall-less house’ has a ground story that’s entirely glass, filtering in whatever colours happen to be outside on the trees and in the sky. In their own lives however, colour is a defining characteristic. Yui wears almost exclusively red; Takaharu blue. The objects they share (car, furniture) are yellow. Their daughter, fourteen, wears yellow, too; their son, eleven, wears green.

The Tezuka family in their 1984 Citroën Deux Chevaux.

Alice: What were some of your early relationships to colour?

Takaharu Tezuka: It started from red.

Yui Tezuka: I loved red since I was very small. It suits me. And I didn’t wear pink. I guess pink is a symbol for girls, but I didn’t like it. Eventually, I quit wearing different colours and decided to wear just red.

Takaharu: I’ll tell you more. I used to work for an office called Richard Rogers’ Partnership. Richard Rogers is the architect who designed the Pompidou Centre and Lloyd’s of London. At that time, Richard Rogers was wearing blue. And everybody in the office was trying to wear blue, because everyone wanted to be like him. Richard Rogers himself didn’t like that solution. So he changed the colour to shocking pink, so that nobody could follow. But still, we stayed in blue.

And then, in 1992, I got married with a lady in red all the time. So eventually it became red and blue. And so, then, when we came back to Japan we found a car. A car in yellow, the yellow Citroën Deux Chevaux. And then, we decided that everything we have in common would be yellow. So that is how it started. It became certain in 1994, when we started our business in Japan.

Eventually, we had a daughter. That was much later, in 2002. And then because everything we share is supposed to be yellow, we made her into yellow. Still now, she loves yellow. Three years later we got a son. We were supposed to make him into yellow as well, but my daughter didn’t like to lose her colour. So she said, let’s give him green. Now we’ve got four colours.

Alice: What were their reactions as they got older? Do your children ever want to change their colours?

Takaharu: I think they’re quite happy about it.

Yui: Yeah. My daughter is quite happy about it. She doesn’t want to wear or have anything except yellow now.

Takaharu: And my son, he’s still wearing green. He doesn’t hate it. But he’s not as fond of green as my daughter is of yellow. But recently we bought a green suitcase, and he loves it.

Yui: Because my daughter is always wearing yellow, when she was in nursery school another child’s mother started to give me yellow clothes. When the mother bought yellow things to give her son, he didn’t want to wear it because it was the colour of our daughter.

Takaharu: And in class, everything yellow belongs to her. So she always gets a big portion, because many things are yellow. She gets a collection. And no one in the class wants to wear yellow, because it’s her colour.

Yui: It’s quite fun. Each of us having our own colours makes us have some kind of identity. I think it’s good. Makes our life easy and more fun.

Alice: Do you wear these colours head to toe? Or do you mix them with other colours?

Takaharu: Red, blue, red, blue, yellow, green – it doesn’t mean that everything is this colour. Underwear is white. [Laughs]. If everything is blue it becomes crazy!

Alice: Where are each of you from? I read your parents were architects.

Yui: I grew up next to Tokyo. And my father is an architect, and I grew up in a house which my father designed. I loved that very much. So I began to have interest in architecture. I decided to become an architect when I was sixteen.

Takaharu: I also grew up in Tokyo. And my father is an architect too, but working for big companies. And on both sides, my grandfathers were architects. Mother’s side, he wanted Frank Lloyd Wright to design his headquarters, but actually Frank Lloyd Wright was too old already. So he had to ask his apprentice to design his headquarters. We are very much a designer’s family.

Alice: Do your children want to be architects?

Yui: My daughter used to say she wanted to be an architect but she decided not to become that.

Takaharu: Yes, still!

Yui: Still, yes, there’s still some interest. But now she’s saying she wants to be a graphic designer.

Takaharu: Recently, a few years ago, she won a competition for school emblem. And the emblem is printed onto all kinds of cans, bags, everything. And she says she became proud of her graphic design.

Alice: I’m curious about how you two work together. What’s that process like?

Takaharu: We actually don’t separate projects. We do everything together. And ok, I do understand the structure aspect of architecture more. And I’m very good at drawing and making models. And my wife is very good at precising the models. So I work first, make it, then she comes with the knife and she cuts to the model I designed carefully. She gets a red pen and makes corrections on my drawing. That’s what she’s very good at.

I think it’s quite important to work together. If I’m alone I can’t decide if my design is the objective. But the way we work together we can make sure this is right or not. It’s a natural feeling. And working together helps that understanding.

Tezuka Architecture’s Echigo-Matsunoyama Natural Science Museum in Japan.

Alice: Does colour play a role in your designs?

Yui: We don’t use colour for our architecture because… how should I say it? The colour should be added with people.

Takaharu: We consider architecture as a kind of platform or a dish, for a nice cuisine. And if the dish is too colourful the cuisine doesn’t look good. So that’s the background. Architecture is quite the basic, natural colour.

Yui: In our lives, colour comes from us and also some things we pick like sofa and bed and accessories.

Alice: In any of the spaces you designed for others, have the people who inhabit or work in them adopted your philosophy on colour?

Takaharu: There are some families, for instance, one family who is in stripes all the time. But that’s nothing to do with us. They had that sense before they met us. So I don’t think our architecture changed their lifestyle. Our design is not to change, but to enhance their lifestyle. But maybe the stripes did become more consistent, after they met us.

Alice: Can I ask about any favourite coloured objects of yours?

Takaharu: A watch! It’s called a Swatch. I like this watch because it’s so basic.

Yui: I like dry material for T-shirts, that’s easy to clean. This shirt is my favourite. When I order, I order like, thirty or forty shirts of this.

Takaharu: For anything I like, the design must be simple. We say we’re like a dog. He’s always wearing the same thing. And in winter, our fur gets a little longer, so we’re wearing a sweater and jacket. And then we take it off, and inside is always the same as the summer.

Alice: How does a simple lifestyle impact your day-to-day routine? Or translate into other areas of your life or work more generally?

Takaharu: To separate the washing – it’s quite easy!

Yui: I don’t need to worry about what to wear every morning.

Takaharu: And the other thing is that people remember us quite easily. Even at my daughter’s school, they know me by colour. Blue father and red mother. And ok, our daughter is yellow. People want know more.

Takaharu: It’s the same thing as in this interview. People are curious.

Alice: What do you think the relationship is between clothing and architecture in general?

Takaharu: I can’t answer the question really, because architecture is a background. It’s better to be natural. But there’s one thing I can say. Architecture should be simple but at the same time it should be lively. So architecture is not black and white or red, often it’s neutral. The brown is natural. Sunlight coming in is cheerful. And in that way, it’s always written who lives there.

Yui: Our architecture has a kind of openness, to the environment. And to the people inside. All the rooms of the people inside can feel the openness to the people next to them and also to the nature.

Alice: If you didn’t wear blue or red, and you had to pick another colour which one would you pick?

Yui: If I have to quit my red? It’s quite difficult to think about. If I had to quit the red.

Alice: So you can’t think of one?

Yui: No, no.

Takaharu: Same me.

Yui: But when I don’t have the red shirt, when I feel cold, sometimes I wear blue.

Takaharu: I give her a blue sweater sometimes.

Alice Hines is Vestoj’s online editor and a writer in New York City.

Capsule Contradictions

Phoebe Maltz Bovy — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 17:46:55 +0000

‘Empty Nest,’ Louise Bourgeois, 1994. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

IN A 1975 EPISODE of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Mary advises her spendthrift (and – unpopular opinion, maybe – fabulous) friend Phyllis on keeping to a budget.¹ Mary shows Phyllis her own monthly expenses, an exchange that leads Phyllis to ask what Mary would do if she saw a gorgeous coat that cost more than twice her monthly clothing budget. Phyllis describes the coat in so much detail that one wonders if it’s a theoretical garment or one Phyllis has her eye on. (It’s camel, leather-trimmed, and fits perfectly.) Mary insists she just wouldn’t buy it until saving up, case closed. It’s only when Phyllis gets to the part about the coat’s original price being hundreds of dollars higher that sensible Mary admits that she would splurge.

Mary and Phyllis illustrate two enduring stereotypes of female consumption: the greedy woman who craves the latest trend, and her frugal counterpart, who carefully budgets. But a crucial thing is different in 2017: Clothing these days is cheaper than it used to be,² and consumers spend proportionally less on it.³ This on-the-surface neutral fact has had a huge, if complicated, impact on fashion. There are, of course, the labour and environmental concerns raised by the proverbial dress that costs the same as a latte. And there is a cultural shift: Now that having a varied, up-to-date wardrobe has ceased to be a luxury for the few, the wealthy have needed to find other ways to distinguish themselves through dress: minimalism.

Minimalist fashion has emerged in implicit response to a myth: that overconsumption has become increasingly widespread, available not just to ladies of leisure, and that women’s hunger for the next new thing is filling landfills. The expression ‘fast fashion’ implies something more than affordability. It suggests a consumer who can’t pile the novelty items into her cart, real or virtual, quickly enough. Because it would be overtly cruel and snobbish to fault women on budgets (which, with stagnant wages and precarious work, is a lot of us) for trying to look presentable, the financial necessity of cheap clothes gets left out of the cultural conversation about inexpensive tank tops.

What’s chic, as always, is to be rich. But wealth is now signalled by standing apart from the Black Friday hordes (remember to post to Facebook about how you’re instead going skiing that day), or the 9-to-5 plebs who seek bargains for sport. Relatability, however, is also in style, so we’ve landed on a narrative of sorts: A (young, rich, photogenic) woman who used to buy All The Stuff, but who has learned the error of her ways, and now invests in a few choice, trend-indifferent items from upscale, and therefore ethical, shops.

It’s called the ‘capsule wardrobe.’ Brands and lifestyle bloggers encourage the sort of woman who might go in for clean-eating ‘bowls,’ and who apologises for having had overly plucked eyebrows in the early 2000s, to embrace it. Women are urged to ‘curate’ our wardrobes, paring them down to a few select items. But maybe we don’t own the right ones? Capsule dressing requires ‘basics,’ which any given woman may or may not already own, and thus tends to come with a list of suggestions, often described, confusingly, as ‘essentials.’

In a piece called ‘You’re doing the “capsule wardrobe” wrong,’ Kelly Dougher traces capsule dressing from its Seventies origins (with Susie Faux, a London shop-owner⁴ ) to the present: ‘[T]he capsule wardrobe,’ argues Dougher, ‘has sneakily been repackaged as a new vessel for our society’s obsession with consumerism.’⁵ Tips on how to shop less are somehow, she observes, shopping lists of their own. What gives?

The new minimalism sends a paradoxical message to women, that we should both feel ashamed for buying so much stuff – or such cheap stuff, as though the two are the same – and that we need to solve our materialism by caring more about what we own, and spending more on each item. Minimalist fashion, in all its pricey asceticism, is about exploiting women’s discomfort with our enjoyment of stuff.

This is, to be fair, a response to an ambivalence some women genuinely express. Caroline Joy Rector, of the capsule-wardrobe lifestyle blog Un-Fancy, explained the impetus for her project as follows: ‘I’d noticed that I had a bad habit of going shopping when I needed to jolt myself out of a bad mood.’⁶ Meanwhile, art director Matilda Kahl told Ad Age that after switching to uniform dressing (that is, wearing the same thing every day, ‘I no longer spend time on choosing clothes nor do I get self-conscious in meetings, which would happen occasionally before.’⁷

Where women are concerned, then, minimalist clothing advice is aimed at tamping down on overabundant desire. Rather than taking your inspiration from that awesome scarf on the woman at the coffee shop this morning, you’re to restrict yourself to sensible basics. Are you A Woman? You require The Navy Blazer, The Pencil Skirt, and so forth, and be sure to pay full price for each. Which brings us to the capsule’s cousin: the Basic Essentials list. (Think Goop’s ‘Ten Investment Pieces You’ll Have Forever,’⁸ which, in fairness, suggests a camel coat not unlike Phyllis’s ideal.)

As Nikki Ogunnaike has pointed out in Elle, these must-own lists have scant relationship with what any individual woman actually wants or needs to wear: ‘But really, can you tell me why I should own ballet flats before I turn 30 this January?’⁹ Elle backtracked from Ogunnaike’s well-put but not especially commercially-friendly point, publishing a clothes-to-own-by-30 guide a couple months later, complete with ballet flats.

The big lie behind these checklists is that there are ‘timeless’ items in the first place. It’s not that every garment goes out of style, but that there’s no way to know which will or when. A quick way to see this is to glance at timeless-classics lists published a decade ago.¹⁰ While the text version doesn’t much change in that timespan – boots, white shirts – the photos tell another story. Jeans you were called to ‘invest’ $200 in circa 2005 – and this is assuming they still fit – will look anything but modern today.

As minimalism has caught on as a trend more generally,¹¹ post-2008, the term has come to connote both the number of items and a particular aesthetic: the kind of gray-scale uniform that looks fabulous when displayed with blond wood floors and white walls, but that seems, once you’re wearing it (at least in my personal experience of, well, wearing it) like you’re in the same grey T-shirts that did nothing special for you as a sixteen-year-old.¹²

It’s good and well to make the case that you can keep wearing clothes that have gone out of style. Plenty of us do! But that’s not a case conducive to selling thousand-dollar trench coats. And it’s absolutely worthwhile to care about labour conditions in garment factories and the environmental impact of discarded clothes, concerns that sometimes weave their way into minimalist rhetoric. But is that what’s really going on when women are instructed to ‘invest’ in beige belted jackets that seem far more practical than they are?

Consider Ralph Lauren’s ‘Forever Pieces’ collection.¹³ (What could be more timeless than eternity?) Among the ‘five smart staples’: ‘the white pant,’ e-commerce-speak for white pants. The notion that this, the world’s most stainable garment would last ‘forever’ requires tremendous suspension of disbelief.

Minimalism’s critics regularly point out that stop-shopping tips all too often amount to advice to buy more than you would otherwise.¹⁴ The go-to example of this is of course Marie Kondo’s reminder to chuck what doesn’t ‘spark joy,’ a strategy all but guaranteed to end with having to buy all new T-shirts. Like diet advice, minimalist clothing tips have a way of encouraging a vulnerable audience to fall deeper into the hole from which they seek to escape. Some sort of French paradox is meant to ensue, where by spending thousands on a handbag, you wind up saving money and turning into an overall less materialistic person.

We see this most clearly with how capsule wardrobes are marketed differently at men than at women. Cladwell sends different messages in its ‘capsules for women’ and ‘roadmap for men’ sections. Men get this message: ‘Tell us what you’re like. We’ll tell you what to like.’ Women: ‘Have too many clothes and nothing to wear?’ Women will get help ‘reduc[ing] the clutter in your closet.’ Men: ‘A personal style guide that takes the guesswork out of clothing.’

The implied male recipient of minimalist clothing advice is a bumbling bachelor who for whatever reason doesn’t have a woman in his life available to make sure he goes out of the house looking like a reasonable adult. He finds shopping tedious, and so needs a checklist. For women, the problem being addressed is excessive enjoyment of shopping, and, secondarily, time sunk into in choosing what to wear each day.

A vocalised dislike of stuff is a way for a man to assert that he’s an adventurous sort who won’t be tied down. The stuff-averse man¹⁵ – think Mark Zuckerberg, proudly sticking with those grey T-shirts,¹⁶ but also everyday dudes who make a point in shuddering when the word “mall” is uttered – is setting himself apart from femininity (as manifested in men or women) and bourgeois responsibility. It doesn’t matter if he devotes his leisure time to rock-climbing or world-saving (and note that the protests that got the world revved up involved women wearing new pink hats). It’s enough for a man to announce a preference for ‘experiences,’ and his female interlocutor will find herself squirming, wondering if maybe the fact that she finds shopping non-torturous makes her a terrible person.

Perhaps because it’s so dead-set on selling us clothes, the new minimalism conveniently sets aside why women might be disproportionately inclined to go clothes-shopping, addressing the shopping, rather than the underlying (supposed) pathology. Is it really a callous, frivolous female indifference to labour conditions and landfills? Women need to look put-together to look professional, whereas certain men, in some settings, can be taken more seriously if they look a bit scruffy.¹⁷ (The flipside here is that men who enjoy clothes and shopping are often stigmatised for this gender-non-conforming behaviour.) Faced with fewer outlets for self-expression or status attainment, we turn a bit more than the dudes do to our own physical self-presentation. And because it would be rather grim not to, we often find ourselves enjoying the process.

If buying (or just browsing) clothes makes you happy, it doesn’t follow that you’re shopping yourself into debt, or are unable to leave your home, so packed has it become with leopard-print rompers. Liking stuff doesn’t necessarily mean purchasing tons of it, or that what you purchase is, on the whole, purchased new. As with all appetites, the desire for stuff exists at a whole range of intensities, and is only a problem if it’s a problem. Practice saying, “I like stuff,” if you do, and doing so with the confidence of someone who knows that the ostentatiously stuff-averse are consuming just as much as you are.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy’s first book, The Perils of ‘Privilege,’ comes out March 2017.

Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art (www.moma.org).