John Lawrence Sullivan by Arashi Yanagawa presents Spring Summer 2027 with Androgyny, a collection built around the body as a site of contradiction. Shown in Berlin, the season examines strength and fragility, beauty and ugliness, discipline and impulse, reason and desire, liberation and restraint, masculinity and femininity. Rather than treating these forces as opposites, Yanagawa brings them into the same frame, using clothing to hold tension instead of resolving it.
SPRING SUMMER 2027
The collection takes Bettina Rheims’ 1990 portrait series Modern Lovers as a key point of departure. Rheims captured bodies outside conventional ideals and social roles, opening space for expressions of gender and identity that resist fixed categories. John Lawrence Sullivan channels that energy through garments that move between codes, allowing the wearer to occupy the boundary rather than choose a side.
Menswear includes boat slit-neck tops, shorts shaped to resemble skirts, and shoes with heels. Womenswear takes on garments historically associated with masculine dress, including double-cuff shirts and mini-length jumpsuits developed from exaggerated military shirts. These exchanges create a deliberate instability. The clothes do not simply borrow from one category and place it into another. They question the category itself.
Textiles deepen the collection’s androgynous language. Raschel lace, net tulle, crushed velvet, and patent finishes appear throughout, bringing materials often linked to ornamentation and femininity into a sharper, more ambiguous context. Their presence softens and exposes the body, but also adds surface tension. Fabric becomes another way to complicate gender, desire, and control.
The Japanese concept of shibari gives the collection its structural force. The word connects discipline, restraint, and the act of binding, while also speaking to the constraints built into tailoring. Yanagawa uses both meanings. Tailored jackets and coats feature self-fabric tapes extending from beneath the lapels, allowing the garments to wrap and tie around the body. Inspired by Nancy Grossman’s bondage drawings, these details bring tailoring into direct contact with physical restriction.
This approach gives the collection one of its strongest ideas: clothing as both liberation and constraint. A jacket can sharpen the body, protect it, expose it, and bind it at once. A heel can shift posture. A skirt-like short can disturb expectation. A military reference can become sensual, fragile, or theatrical.
Transformation runs through the accessories. Snake and lizard patterns, along with python leather, appear across shoes, belts, bags, and gloves. Rather than functioning as simple decoration, these surfaces act as a second skin, drawing from the image of snakes shedding and regenerating. The body becomes something in transition, always changing form.
Spring Summer 2027 continues John Lawrence Sullivan’s interest in power, sexuality, and the constructed body. Through androgyny, restraint, and transformation, Yanagawa creates a collection that refuses clean definition. Its strength lies in the unresolved space between opposites.
