Skip to main content
Wardatrobe
Masahiro Nakagawa
デザイナー

Masahiro Nakagawa

Japanese designer who co-founded the Harajuku label 20471120 in 1992 and later became a contemporary artist.

生年 1967
出身地 Shiga Prefecture, Japan
国籍 Japanese

Masahiro Nakagawa co-founded 20471120 with the designer LICA, ran it through the 1990s and closed it after a final show in 2003. He entered fashion through illustration rather than pattern cutting and later moved into painting, installation and projects built from reused clothing. Within Ura-Harajuku—the network of backstreet shops behind the district's main avenues—20471120 stood apart through large theatrical shows, computer-derived textiles and the recurring Hyōma-kun character. (DOZiNE)

Origins: from drawing to Minami-Semba

Nakagawa was born in Shiga Prefecture in 1967. His route into clothing ran through GATHER, a self-published visual magazine put together in Osaka by young independent designers, chief among them Takao Yamashita of beauty:beast; Nakagawa contributed graphics and illustration to it, and the involvement drew him into Osaka's small, informal design scene, where he met LICA (Rika Asechi). The two decided to start a label of their own. (DOZiNE)

In 1992 they opened as BELLISSIMA, first from a rented room in Minami-Semba and then from a shopping arcade in Abeno, Osaka, splitting a small rented unit into a shop and an office. Nakagawa has said almost no stock survives from the roughly two years the label traded under that name, before a trademark dispute forced a change. (DOZiNE; Kyoto Costume Institute)

From Bellissima to a date in the future

The Osaka apparel firm Misaki Shoji held a registered trademark on the name Bellissima, and once Nakagawa and LICA's shows had built the name a following, the company contacted them about it; rather than pay for the right to keep using it, the pair renamed the label in 1994. (DOZiNE; Kyoto Costume Institute)

The new name was a string of digits, 20471120, styled and spoken digit by digit ("two-oh-four-seven-one-one-two-oh") rather than as a word. Nakagawa has said the sequence came to him while he was half-asleep, and that he preferred it to a word precisely because a word already carries fixed meaning, whereas a run of numbers stays open; read as a date, 20 November 2047, it also gave him and his collaborators a future point to work towards, with a celebration they planned to hold together once it arrived. (DOZiNE)

Still based in Osaka under the new name, the label reached the Tokyo Collections at roughly the same moment as Undercover; Nakagawa recalls the season as 1995, the year the brand also opened its first Tokyo shop, in Jingūmae near Omotesandō, in December. A gallery chronology from a 2003 exhibition instead dates the Tokyo debut to 1994; the two accounts disagree by a year. (DOZiNE; Fashion Press Japan; NADiff)

The label reached Paris in 1997, opening a Tokyo office at the same time, and at its peak was carried by roughly a hundred stockists nationally, alongside as many as six directly run shops and in-shops. (Fashion Press Japan; DOZiNE)

A fashion show is also a circus

20471120 built its reputation as much on spectacle as on clothing. Early shows were staged on a rented golf course near the Abeno shop and under a tent outside Hibiya Public Hall in Tokyo; by roughly the fourth Tokyo show, in 1996, Nakagawa had begun collaborating with Kinoshita Circus, one of Japan's oldest touring circus companies, staging an Ultraman-themed show under the big top and selling tickets to the public rather than restricting entry to press and buyers, an approach Nakagawa has said was close to unheard of in Japanese fashion at the time. Another show, at Asakusa's Hanayashiki amusement park, sent models down the runway in monster costumes and rubber "kaijū boots" Nakagawa designed from scratch. (DOZiNE)

It was for the Kinoshita Circus show that Nakagawa introduced Hyōma-kun, a childlike cartoon character with the words "SEX" and "VIOLENCE" lettered across its cheeks, a figure he had drawn unnamed since his student days. Printed onto garments priced at the level of Vivienne Westwood — T-shirts from around ¥20,000, blouses and shoes running well beyond that — Hyōma-kun struck some critics as a novelty, and 20471120 was dismissed in places as a children's brand for taking it seriously. Nakagawa has pointed out that this happened before Takashi Murakami's own anime-derived Pop art broke through internationally; Murakami included 20471120 in the "Tokyo Pop" feature of the magazine Kōkoku Hihyō and in his book Superflat, exposure Nakagawa credits with changing how the work was read. (DOZiNE)

The design was not purely visual novelty. A pantsuit from the Spring/Summer 1996 collection, held by the Kyoto Costume Institute, pairs a conventional four-button single-breasted jacket with a mesh pattern that looks hand-loomed but was generated on a computer, then rewoven by hand into a nylon-cotton cloth — an analogue technique standing in for a digital image, just as Windows 95 and the PlayStation were reaching Japanese households. The Institute reads the piece as characteristic of a brand moving easily between high fashion, streetwear, subculture and fine art. (Kyoto Costume Institute)

Nakagawa and LICA were, by their own account from an interview at the height of the label's popularity, uninterested in growing sales for their own sake: they built only what came from themselves, without regard for what would sell, saying "if we thought too much about profitability, the clothes would end up feeling insincere," and that a label run their way could not sensibly exceed about ¥150 million in annual sales without losing control of it. (note. via Koji Yamada)

Exhaustion and the recycling years

By 1998 the label had grown well beyond the two friends who started it — Nakagawa has described it as run like a band that had simply gotten larger without becoming a company — and that year it won the 16th Mainichi Fashion Grand Prix's New Designer Prize. Nakagawa also began a parallel, more personal art project that year under the name Nakagawa-Sōchi (中川装置). (Fashion Press Japan)

In 1999, by his own account, Nakagawa reached a point close to burnout: years of near-continuous production had left him unable to remember when or why he had bought the objects piling up, unopened, in his own apartment. Sorting through them slowly brought his memory back, object by object, and left him convinced the same forgetting was happening more broadly, in a consumer culture moving from one new model to the next too fast to let anything acquire a history. Out of that conviction came the Tokyo Recycle Project, begun in 1999, which built collections from clothes drawn from the closets of Nakagawa's own circle of designers and buyers rather than from new cloth. (DOZiNE)

The first three rounds were staged as 20471120 collections; after that, Nakagawa continued the project independently, and it grew in reach — presented at the Art Tower Mito, the 2001 Yokohama Triennale, MoCA Los Angeles, P.S.1 in New York, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., among other venues, through 2002. (DOZiNE; NADiff)

The end of 20471120

The label's Shibuya shop was renewed in 2001, but by Nakagawa's account both he and LICA had lost their motivation for the seasonal collection cycle well before that: staff numbers and obligations had grown steadily further from what the two of them had actually wanted to do, to the point that LICA had at one stage suggested disbanding outright. 20471120 staged its final show at Tennōzu Isle in 2003; the two designers talked it over afterwards and agreed to close the label. Nakagawa has said the decision felt inevitable rather than painful — his own attention had already moved to recycling and contemporary art, the market was shifting towards fast fashion, and the label's scale had already contracted. Asked whether he had regrets, he said he did not, adding that he suspected he had never really been making fashion as fashion in the first place, only pursuing the theatre of the show itself. (Fashion Press Japan; DOZiNE)

After the label

Nakagawa's subsequent work has stayed close to the same material — clothing, memory and reuse — presented as art rather than seasonal collections. In December 2003 the Tokyo gallery NADiff showed Matsugorou (松吾郎), dressing bonsai pine trees in cloth, framed by the gallery as an early version of the "Bonsai Japan" concept he was preparing for Mori Art Museum's 2004 "Roppongi Crossing" survey. In 2006 he produced Recyclechure (リサイクチュール), a one-off collection remade from used clothing for eighteen women across eight countries. LICA, meanwhile, launched a new brand, Zechia, in 2008, with Nakagawa as its creative director. (NADiff; Fashion Press Japan)

As of a 2019 interview, Nakagawa was living and working from a studio in Tateyama, on the Chiba coast, painting a series of works that has included a piece shown at Sotheby's in Tel Aviv. (DOZiNE)

Reading and dating 20471120

Begin with the name. Bellissima belongs to Nakagawa and LICA's 1992–94 period; 20471120 was adopted in 1994, debuted on the Tokyo Collection calendar in 1995 and ended after the final Tennōzu Isle show in 2003. The Paris presentations fall inside that run from 1997. (DOZiNE; Fashion Press Japan)

Separate standard collection pieces from Tokyo Recycle Project garments made from 1999. The latter used secondhand clothes supplied by Nakagawa's circle, so fabric, fit and sizing need not match a conventional production run. Computer-derived woven effects are consistent with the mid-1990s collections, while the Hyōma-kun character supplies only a lower boundary: it first appeared at the 1996 Kinoshita Circus show. Neither clue identifies an exact season. (DOZiNE; Kyoto Costume Institute)

Do not treat Zechia, LICA's label from 2008, as a continuation of 20471120 even though Nakagawa served as its creative director. The old 20471120 domain now points to an unrelated fan-run page and is not an official archive. (Fashion Press Japan; DOZiNE)

References

記録
原語表記
中川正博
受賞
Mainichi Fashion Grand Prix New Designer Prize, 1998

主な作品

該当する結果が見つかりませんでした

キーワードやフィルター条件を変更して再度お試しください。

すべてのフィルターをクリア