Underwear goes minimalist under creative eye of ‘Project Runway’ alum

by MIKE CHAIKEN

CTFashionMag.com

When fashion designer Kentaro Kameyama competed on “Project Runway,” his tendency to be artistic elevated (and sometimes undermined) his creations.

Now that he’s no longer vying for a crown on Heidi Klum’s reality television concoction, Kameyama has surrendered the movement downstream toward commerce and has kept paddling up stream for the sake of art.

At Art Hearts Fashion in the Angel Orensanz Foundation on Norfolk Street in New York City, Kameyama tackled the most commercial, and sometimes mundane, articles of fashion. And he did his best to elevate it to art at this Feb.9 runway show.

Kameyama used his platform at New York Fashion Week to launch Bacteria Underwear, a unisex line of undergarments.

Kameyama put his little gray cells to work to design underwear. But this is not the underwear you wear on Valentine’s Day or your honeymoon. The line is not emboldened with lace and bright colors. Bacteria Underwear is the anti-Victoria’s Secret.

As shown at Art Hearts Fashion, Kameyama has put the focus on minimalism. The runway for Bacteria Underwear was filled with nude, white, and black.

And rather than sell the garments by augmenting the models with audacious wings and accompanying their walk rap or rock music. The models wore fabric cocoons with their undergarments. And Kameyama’s runway soundtrack was a haunting, eerie, and dissonant minimal music, forcing the models to float down the runway rather than stomp.

The presentation was creative. And for those with open-minds, Kameyama exhibited sheer genius by asking us to rethink how we view our briefs.

PHOTOS by MIKE CHAIKEN