Order -The Chappelle Bunch shirt and hoodie
Click here to buy it now: The Chappelle Bunch shirt and hoodie
Much as the early Bay Area proponents of the Slow Food movement once sought to alert a generation raised on Saltines and Cheez Whiz to the wonders of a locally sourced tomato, Mr. Kinori seems focused on simplifying his chain of supply.
When first encountered one foggy afternoon at his shop in Hayes Valley and then again at his new studio across town in lower Pacific Heights, Mr. Kinori talked excitedly about his sources and varied inspirations. Those may equally include a stenciled canvas duffel bag from his father’s Israeli boyhood; a tsubo jar by the Japanese ceramist Kazunori Hamana; designs from Rei Kawakubo’s famous 1997 “hump” collection or a monumental drawing of a cleft boulder rendered by the artist Afton Love in charcoal and wax.
Though there is a tendency to romanticize indie designers working outside the so-called fashion system, Mr. Kinori resists the cliché and is quick to say he backed into design as if by default.
In his 20s and armed, if that is the word, with a liberal arts education with specialties in philosophy and French, he decided to enroll in the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, a local school with a heavy emphasis on the trades. “It was definitely not predicted that I would be a patternmaker,” said the designer who, though raised near New Haven, left the East Coast at 18 to attend, for a brief and not notably successful period, San Francisco State University.
“It was the first time in my life when I did something that felt completely natural,” he said of his stint at FIDM, as the school is known. “I really had no burning aspirations to have a career in design. I was mostly fueled by dissatisfaction with what I wanted and couldn’t find.”
Comentarios