costume play

There is an old photo which shows my childhood with my family member; me, my elder brother, my parents, and my grand mother. I try to reproduce the costume which each member was wearing in the photo so that the costume can fit closely what each grown-up member is. Then I try to take the same picture of the same family member with the same reproduced costume and of course at the same place.
In the animal world, once a baby grows up to be able to support oneself, it comes to be a complete stranger, which doesn't have any more relationship with its parents. In the human world, on the other hand, even if a baby grows up to be able to do it, we never lose the special relationship between parents and children. It's only because we put a stress or an important point on its blood relationship. A family is an environment made by artificial concepts.
We do "costume play" a role of "family" as complete strangers each other.

cast of skin

There is an old picture that shows my childhood with my mother who held me. I reproduced this situation by clothes.
My clothes as the cast off skin of me sticked on my mother and my mother's clothes as the cast off skin of my mother sticked on me, or be shouldered, or hide inside of her huge clothes.

matching

In an old picture, my brother and I wore matching sweaters with our initials. Those were might be made by my mother. This time I followed her and I knitted sweaters for my mother and father.
They wore the matching sweater with their sons in the old days.

position 2006

In a train, people who are complete strangers each other very often sit or stand together. It sometimes seems to be stuck together, for they are sitting or standing to close each other. It is quite curious space for me. When I am in such space, I come to feel certain confusion. It means that I find some difficulties in giving a clear definition for the relationship between myself and the others. I can't say which my part of the body is really and which the part of the others is. At that time, it is so easy for me to imagine another face between two different persons. The new face seems to be real existence.
According to this conception, I created new type of clothes. If we stick each half of the two persons' clothes together, we can see one new clothes between them.
Each performer have to play not only himself or herself, but also one new different person. It mean that he or she should play two different persons at the same time. In addition, each performer have to share the new different person with the other performer.

scramble clothes

It’s the project, where people create something entirely new through out certain communication by exchanging some parts of their own clothes with others. By using snap buttons for the pars of clothes such as collar, sleeve, body, or skirt etc, it becomes possible to exchange the parts with other people. When we are going out, we could say our clothes are the closest part to the individual or might be a part of ourselves by covering up our body. By exchanging such clothes, we could do really close communication as if we exchanged a part of our body itself. And then, we make up one flexible free community, where people could be someone else. Moreover, we have chance to think over that such communication and the flexibility produce not only the new form of clothes but also that of relationship.

uniform

There is a suits that shows everything inside. Therefore when I wear it everybody can see the inside of this suits and my clothes that I wear everyday.
Generally suits are one of the "uniform" for many people, especially boys in Japan. They wear those in variety of situation as graduation or some ceremony or so on. Also they are going to wear those almost every day when they get a job. I pretend this situation by wore this suits. When I wear this, my surface will be fit in the society like the other people. However on the other hand the material of this suits that shows everything inside of it will emphasize myself in my ordinally days.
This is the uniform of me, Yoshinari Nishio.

ensemble

People spend a day with the clothes on by picking them up from a drawer or some hangers in a closet. During a day, clothes make various sounds by every movement people do, such as rubbing clothes against each other, zipping up, scratching on what one feels itchy, searching for something inside a pocket or taking off the magic tape and so on…Don’t you think there might be ensemble whoever wears some clothes could join in?

storyscape

“Is it your own clothes? You look really nice!”
“Really? When I went to pay the rent to an elder owner of my apartment, who was around 80 years old, I got it from her. She said it was too colorful for her age to wear it and also she said she had a daughter who was about the same age as me. That ‘s how I got it.”
When we see only the outside of the fashion, we can never find out the real story behind the fashion itself. As you can see from these conversation, there is always a hidden story in each clothes, which only who wears it knows about.
By having some interviews, I collected a lot of hidden stories. Then I made uniforms printed out these stories on the back side. During the exhibition, the cafe shop assistants put these uniforms on. As each clothes has the own hidden story inside, I tried to make such story come up again as an outside of the clothes. By doing so, I thought I might see a new aspect of fashion coming out.
I took place this exhibition in the “library” cafe on the 49th floor, which had a really nice “view”. In such “library” cafe, I wanted to present a new sight or scene of fashion as another reading thing.

defective clothes

Whichever clothes we buy, we usually choose the size that might suit us. Then we almost always wear what we have just bought without changing any designs. That’s why the clothes easily make us do some typical actions, such as letting arms put into the sleeves or fastening buttons on the clothes. Because of this ordinal reaction to the clothes, we could never see any differences between the people, who wear the same clothes in the same way. When I realized this fact, I got interested in designing the reverse situation for the clothes; for example, “too big to wear it finely” “could never much the buttons with the buttonholes” or “no armholes.” By making these abnormal clothes, which have a lot of imperfect parts as the clothes in a sense, I wanted every person who tried to put on it to create his or her own original way of wearing it.

At first, I gave a presentation on this idea by doing a fashion show. After that, I offered enough time to do some workshop so that the audience could have experiences with these new types of clothes. What would happen if people encountered such clothes, which they couldn’t wear it in the normal way? This funny situation in the workshop was exactly that I wanted to present. That’s why I called this situation of such a new type of fashion show in itself as “workshop,” in stead of calling it as just “fashion show.”  Of course, everyone could join in the workshop, and could enjoy oneself just by seeing the show.