First of all, respect to Charaf Tajer for framing this Japanese-flavored collection around kaizen, a mindset of continual self-improvement. “I feel like, as a person, that’s how I am today. I’m working a lot on myself, but also the brand and its structure: it’s really about improvements, of the collection and everything in the brand,” he said. This rejection of hubris for humility was a refreshing point of view: fashion is not exactly brimming with designers or entrepreneurs who will publicly entertain the notion that their work could be improved upon, even when it seriously needs to be.
The flipside of that is that today’s Casablanca collection did indeed merit future improvement. It was built around what Tajer stated as his perceived Japanese-specific duality between “people who party super hard and dress crazy, and the serious, dark side of Japan: the Yakuza.” The runway manifestation of this was expressed through Casablanca’s take on kawaii via Casablanca’s take on Japanese-inflected corporate tailoring and hitwoman eveningwear. This seemed like a massively reductive precis of what is among the world’s most nuanced, layered and intelligent fashion cultures.
Tajer’s rationale read like a narrative built to service a business ambition to expand Casablanca beyond its silkily ironic and sporty metier and into more mature categories. The tailoring featured ceremonial collar-shapes and embellished sakura-style florals in some dark and slinky attractive fabrications. And yet in a world bursting with brilliant tailoring brands, this iteration of the form did not demand to be worn.
More convincing was the safer ground of party-hard wear both ebullient and messy. The zip-up shirt dress and knit polo featuring the cheesy diagonal decal stripes of a mid-’80s Mazda muscle car were fun. Moto looks, skimpy womenswear separates in punchy colors, Tacchini-adjacent gangster tracksuits and an obligatory souvenir silk shirt were all safely in Casablanca territory. The semi-bewildering addition of ski and snowboarding inflected looks was perfectly entertaining.
Store buyers I travel between shows with assure me that Casablanca still sells pretty strongly thanks to an offer that tends not to echo its runway manifestations too closely. To rectify the course of those manifestations, which have swerved dangerously in recent seasons, Casablanca should pay more than lip service to kaizen.
