FROM JAPAN
a new season for daily products
What kind of keywords and images come to your mind if I ask you about underwear and stationary ? With underwear: sexy, close to skin, personal, hidden, lace, color, intimate relationship, keep the body stylish and so on…With stationary: pen and paper, something for work and study, on the desk, office use …
Recently, two new projects made us open our eyes again toward these ordinary daily product.
One is by “une nana cool” directed by Wacoal, one of the top and creative underwear company which has been dealing with human body and its beauty. Wacoal is THE company with very innovative use of new material, new vision toward the beauty of women’s body. With their private brand called “une nana Coeur and Lunch”, they propose a new vision toward underwear. It is far from stereotype sexy approach. It is closer to art and fashion. For example, the product called “Pantsnpa” invites us to create our own under pants. Using stretch fabric which can be cut easily by scissors and without worrying about fray, they propose the customer to cut out their own pants with the comfortable length. Colorful fabric invite our intuition to what we want to put on. We are excited like kids to “cut out” our underwear with scissors. The result is a personal comfort of under pants with your own length, a wonderful fit and a smooth surface which made us feel luxury.
About stationary, surprisingly, even after we note everything in our smart phones nowadays, stationary and paper products become more important much more than before. We feel like having stationary on our desk, in our bag and want to write down with pen.
We start to search for the “best design” in stationary, which we still want to keep even if we can do everything with our iPhone. Tsutaya Book Store is the biggest and the most interesting bookstore opened last year in the center of Daikanyama. We realize again the fun to read books and the excitement to be in a book store. With this very challenging shop, we can see again the joy of “stationary”. They invite designers, artists, architects and material companies to create together the new stationary.
Tsutaya Book Store don’t design the stationary but they see the material again with a new vision and what we can do and want to do with the “stationary of 21st century”.
When we look around us in the town, don’t you feel sometimes we have enough? Same style of fashion, same things, same and same… Since only a slight different color or design is called “new”, we lost our appetite toward shopping. But when I cut out my own underwear with scissors and when I think of a new stationary, suddenly, I feel the excitement and start to imagine a life with these stuffs, which will open our senses to the daily life and will make us happy to use them and be creative.
Something ordinary but new will lead our life soon.
Kaori Ieyasu