Individual Sentiments

Individual sentiments is a label that mixes Japanese conceptualism with precise Italian tailoring. The collection includes footwear and leather goods with bold silhouettes and an approach to craftsmanship that is almost origami-like in nature. The brand was founded in 2009 by designer Yoko Ito and in 2012 a shoe division has been launched under the name of IS.

The affirmation of a presence to the world is nothing else than the reverse of a technical mastery seeking to remain discreet. Yoko Ito’s work for individual sentiments originates in the rigorous fulfillment of a minimal precept that her clothes never deceive. This strong stance forbids the designer to choose the easy way of the imagination. Cocking a snook at the world of fashion where the will to distinction is almost always the cunning of a generalized standardization, Yoko Ito shifts the emphasis from the creation of a symbolic language to the materiality of the garnement. She is aware that inventing a new world is a vain undertaking because the world as it is continues to preexists to our imagination and defeats it. She knows that in fashion when one aims for a fanciful novelty one often ends up in the much more mundane realm of advertisement. The individual sentiments clothes plainly belong to our world here and now. Their singularity doesn’t stem from the cyclical temporality of fashion, nor from the calculated planning of the market. A meticulous selection of the quality of the fabrics and high technical precision cuts are the two elements of the one gesture through which Yoko Ito gives life to her silhouettes, season after season. Her pencil’s suppleness and resoluteness makes us think to the knife of Lord Wenhui’s butcher in Zhuangzi, a Taoist classic. The butcher explains to the amazed Lord that his extraordinary dexterity in cutting up an ox effortlessly and without wearing down his knife relies on his ability to exactly follow the ox ligaments and to slide the blade along the spaces and the disjunctions. The individual sentiments clothes are designed and crafted in a similarly organic relationship to the world surrounding them. They loom in the streets of the world capitals as urban and materialist epiphanies. They cover bodies with a timeless and for this very reason modern attitude through which artifice becomes a second nature and transforms necessity in a form of freedom. And this precisely is the definition of style.