Kei interview

Kei Kagami, who was Alexdaner McQueen's classmate at St Martins. He imagines himself as a true artisan and creator, and over the past 15 years Kagami has created clothes, shoes and conceptual pieces characterised by striking forms and a unique use of unconventional materials.Anatomy, biology, ecology and futurism combine in his more surreal designs where glass tubes, vials and magnifying glasses are used to break down traditional boundaries and address themes of transformation and the interaction of the garment with the wearer. He graduated with a degree in Architecture and worked with iconic Japanese architect Kenzo Tange, but then decided to pursue a career in fashion and enrolled at the Tokyo Institute of Culture and Fashion.
Moving to London, he worked under John Galliano's before moving on to Central Saint Martins, where he completed an MA in Fashion Design in 1992.

Me：Kei your stuff is full of industrial elements, and you're a vintage biker fan and tuning expert yourself. But in this age of mechanical replication, there's hardly anything that can't be replicated. How do you adapt to this environment？

K: I've realised how wholesome life in the industrial revolution and the mechanical age is in comparison. Not in terms of standard of living, but more as an ideology. First of all, there is a world of difference between machinery and computers. Machinery you can see its structure, you can understand how it works physically by looking at it. If it breaks down, you can often fix it yourself. But with computers, even if you open the case and look at it, the average person doesn't understand its inner workings. Even if there are professionals who can fix it, they won't get themselves into trouble. Once they meet a problem that can't be repaired well, the solution is often to find a brand new part to replace the bad one, or sometimes even just eliminate the old product. I think I see a kind of humanity in mechanical civilisations, if you can fix, or "take care" of a piece of machinery, it means we can live with it. For example, I like to play with vintage motorbikes, and these are machines that if you take care of them, they will be happy and keep working for a long time to come. But if you leave them alone without regular maintenance, they can fuck you over really badly. In a way, thinking about it, these machines really are more like people than people. That kind of soul, I can feel it when I'm riding a motorbike, the feeling that he will smile at you. I believe in machinery but I don't believe in computers that will betray you one day. So to criticise the computer civilisation, I think the corresponding value is not necessarily environmentalism, but perhaps machinery. My works show a very simple linkage between human body and machinery, a kind of synergy and symbiosis.

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