PROFILE
Born 1980 in Kunitachi City, Tokyo . Graduated from the School of Social Sciences at Waseda University. He was introduced to Keisuke Kanda by an instructor at his preparatory school, and while still in college he attended the Vantan Design Institute, where he began making clothes and started "ANREALAGE. The brand name "ANREALAGE" means "A REAL" (everyday life), "UN REAL" (extraordinary life), and "AGE" (age). The brand focuses on the unrealistic twists and turns of everyday life, and extracts the starting point for its designs from trivial details that might otherwise be overlooked. He professes to be influenced by Fujiko Fujio's science fiction (Sukashi Fushigi). This is his first appearance in HOUYHNHNM.
The "Jap" dealt with society through the lens of fashion.
Morinaga-san, how did you interact with books when you were a child?
In terms of original experience, my father was the director of the city library, so we had a lot of books at home. . Since I was an only child, I spent a lot of alone time reading books. When I was in elementary school, I was a Fujiko F. Fujio fan and loved "Doraemon," but when Osamu Tezuka came to my hometown to give a performance, I also fell in love with Tezuka manga. Later, when I became a junior high school student, I started reading literature as well, and I can't remember how I started, but I was reading Kajii Kanjiro and Dazai Osamu.
. What about the artist resonated with you?
I like stories in which everyday life is transformed. Not "science fiction" science fiction, but "slightly mysterious" science fiction. I like stories in which a person's daily life has not changed much, but his or her mind has changed dramatically. So, "The Graduates" by Kajii Kanjiro was shocking to me. I also liked the stories in Fujiko F. Fujio's "SF Short Stories," in which the ordinary sense of daily life is lost, and the characters look back on their daily lives.
Do you remember reading any fashion-related books at that time?
High school was a private school , so I finally started to buy clothes on my own initiative. I started reading a magazine called "Jap" around that time, and I liked the attitude of the magazine, which was not limited to fashion alone, but rather, it was fighting against society and culture by cutting into them through fashion. . And that is how I came to see the overlap between what I liked and fashion.
You were born in 1980, which means you were born in the heyday of the backstreets.
. Yes, I did. At the time, Jonio had already started a Series in "Treasure Island" and I was reading that too. When I was in high school, I would go to Harajuku to buy clothes and stand in line at the store, but in the end I couldn't buy any clothes. When I went to Cat Street, I was amazed at the phenomenon of clothes being sold for 20,000 yen or so, and I felt that fashion was amazing.
. So there was a lot of energy surrounding fashion.
However, even though I was in the vortex of the backstreets, I also saw people going to "nowhere" stores and somehow buying clothes they didn't know anything about, and then selling them for five times the price of what they could afford. I was exposed to this unusual fashion culture, and I got the impression that fashion is an incredibly deep world.
