Aramame Nobuyoshi Araki

Published in July 2016 by Kurogouchi Design Office, Aramame is a collaboration between Nobuyoshi Araki and the Japanese fashion label mame kurogouchi, led by designer Maiko Kurogouchi. Issued in a limited edition of 1,000 copies at a generous 20 x 30 cm and running to only around sixteen plates, it is closer to an artist's book than a catalogue. Rather than commissioning a conventional lookbook, Kurogouchi handed the shooting of her seasonal collection over to Araki, who then built the images through collage — taping together positives from the fashion shoot with his own photographs of small, peculiar arrangements of flowers, dolls, toys, and sex objects. The result dissolves the boundary between fashion and still life, eroticism and the everyday, treating garments, bodies, and objects as equally desirable subjects. The tension is the point: mame kurogouchi's delicate, botanical, quietly sensual world collides with Araki's provocatively raw eye, producing an unexpected chemistry. A playful late-career experiment with clothing as subject, and a genuinely scarce collector's object.