Deconstruction By Design
Review of Sacai Fall 2026 Men’s Fashion Show
By Angela Baidoo
The mainstay in Sacai founder Chitose Abe’s work is ‘hybridization’. Multiple categories often collide in one garment, as the designer has always known that modularity would dictate our future.
As the luxury consumer refuses to settle for less when paying exponentially more, Abe’s collections are layered with inherent value. Never drifting too far from her signature style, the designer consistently manages to fuse new ideas, collaborations, and decorative features onto her deconstructed designs and make them appear as if they had always belonged. This season she afforded herself the freedom to dismantle the established order and go about breaking free from society’s archetypes.
THE COLLECTION
THE VIBE
Breaking Free, Dismantling Order, Punching Above Her Weight
The symbolism used throughout today’s collection was ripe for the unpicking.
The need for freedom specifically may have been the designers way to address the global unrest taking place outside of the fashion week ecosystem. Her soundtrack needed no interpretation of its message, as Queen’s “I want to break free” could have been in reference to nations breaking free from the grip of dominant global superpowers and going it alone. Case in point “I want to break free. I want to break free from your lies. You’re so self-satisfied. I don’t need you…God knows, got to make it on my own”. The show closed with Tears for Fears thought-provoking “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, released at a time when the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union made the threat of nuclear war an everyday reality (not unlike where we stand today). The relevance of the song a fitting way to close out the last day of fashion week.
Unlike in the wider world, for fall 2026 Chitose Abe explored the ‘the beauty of destruction’. Using an image of the late World Heavyweight Champion boxer – Muhammad Ali – throwing one of his signature punches, it symbolised the idea of breaking through and breaking free. Incidentally, the shows set design was a drywall partition that separated the space and appeared to have had a hole punched through it à la Ali. Backstage the designer told The Impression “I wanted to express the power to break through the wall, to be free. That was the starting point of the collection.”
There was also an intention to not adhere to the rules of the runway by designing with an unrestricted vision. “When we’re creating the clothes, there’s [always] some expectation that they need to be this way, or that way. [It should be that] we don’t need to create something that is sellable, we want it to be free from that and think of outside the box.” she expanded. This uninhibited thought process led to one of the best silhouettes of the season. Seeing as statement pants have been trending – from to Dior’s jacquard florals to Ralph Lauren’s pea green cords – a mash up of tailored bermuda shorts and straight leg trousers were a satisfying experiment. The construction wizardry meant that the shorts section morphed away from the trouser leg without a seam in sight! This is what makes Sacai so special and each piece a statement in its own right. Jackets were also ‘spliced horizontally’ with the lower part sewn to the lining so both sections moved independently when worn but were still constructed as one jacket.
No stranger to a successful collaboration, fall will see the designer revisit her partnership with Levi’s. Remixing the Type 1 and Type 2 denim jacket silhouettes, she merged them with spliced tweed blazers and tailored wool coats, sandwiching them between layers. Fly fronts on wide-leg trousers were deliberately left unzipped to reveal the top half from a pair of jeans, and an MA1 jacket found a new lease of life in selvedge denim. Considered ‘dear friends’ and fellow patchwork enthusiasts, A.P.C.’s Jessica Ogden and her ‘Quilts project’ (started in 2010 to repurpose fabric deadstock) inspired the finale looks of reworked quilted skirts and jackets with the Sacai touch.
Fall 2026 saw Chitose Abe test boundaries and take her ideas on a journey until she arrived at a place of discomfort by design.
THE DIRECTION
THE QUOTE
The wall of the set was the breakthrough of a punch, so he (Muhammad Ali) was like the symbol. He was the inspiration and is aligned to what we do. It was the statement of freedom that we wanted to exert in this collection.
Chitose Abe, Creative Director, Sacai
THE WRAP UP
Speaking to The Impression about rejecting a preoccupation with creating sellable designs, it is hard to fathom Sacai ever having faced this problem. Still considered one of fashion’s most visionary designers (years spent by the side of Junya Watanabe will tend to yield those results), for Chitose Abe to feel that she has to break free from uniformity and dismantle ideas around beauty is telling of the times we are living through.
In challenging her own self-imposed restrictions on what fall 2026 could look like, we were gifted with another collection that played up construction ‘trickery’, an instant sell-out of a collaboration, and iconic symbolism as a reminder to break free and ‘punch through’.
