Take a behind-the-scenes look into Suzusan's process and read a note from the founder and creative director, Hiroyuki Murase.
A note from Hiroyuki Murase on their Spring Collection 'Encounter' -
For the past eight years or so, I have been visiting Basel, Switzerland, to research the collections of the "Museum der Kulturen" (Museum of Culture). This museum was founded in 1875 and houses 330,000 objects of high cultural value from all over the world, individually numbered and carefully preserved in the Depot.
Mongolian rugs, Tibetan Buddhist artifacts, shields, spears and masks from various African regions, glittering ornaments of the Miao ethnic minority in China and huge prayer statues from Oceania. The backgrounds of the various cultures and regions and their inhabitants leap out every time I open a drawer, and you can hear the breath of the people who made them. All the clothes and ornaments here are carefully made by human hands, long before the modern term 'fashion' came to be used. These are things that shelter from the cold, offer prayers, intimidate enemies and enliven festivities. Many of these items must have taken an enormous amount of time to make from the limited materials available at the time, and when you imagine that they were made with considerable concentration, the honest approach to craftsmanship comes to the fore. Whenever I touch the roots of this handwork, I receive a silent message from the anonymous predecessors, and I always renew my commitment to manufacturing with sincerity.
In between many wonderful collections of Japanese clothing, from Okinawa to Ainu, there is also a collection of about 250 Shibori items from Arimatsu, my hometown, quietly sleeping in a corner of the depot. They explained to me that the museum's former director, Albert Bühler (1900-1981), visited Japan in 1964 and, while walking around the country, stopped in Arimatsu and visited various workshops and brought back many Yukatas or Kimonos and textiles to Switzerland. When I saw them for the first time, I was moved by the chance encounter with my roots in a faraway land. As well as marveling at the high level of design at the time, I touched each piece of cloth, remembering that some of the artisans, who are now elderly, must have made some of the pieces when they were children.
There are countless cultures that have disappeared from the world even in the last half-century. Most of them will probably never be revived again. We can pass on the culture of the small town of Arimatsu to the next world by touching the past, drawing a picture of the future and passing on the bridge of time. What will be stored in this depot in the future?
To make with care and use with care. The clothes in Basel, far from my hometown, continue to quietly send a very simple message to those of us living in this age.
