Photo: Marcio Madeira

"Some people seek thrills in travel," said Mihara Yasuhiro backstage. "I'm looking for peace." He called his latest collection "Left and Right" to convey the sense of a journey from one place to another, specifically along the Silk Road, the ancient trade route that linked West and East. The soundtrack was provided by Fuyuki Yamakawa, a one-man band who used guitar, drums, and some less conventional instrumentation, wiring his body for sound (including a mike in the corner of one eye!). That idea—at once primal and technological—was a perfect aural complement to Mihara's designs, which achieved their atavistic allure with the most advanced fabric treatments. I particularly liked the threadbare effect on suitings, as though the clothes had been worn to the point of exhaustion by someone who'd been heading East for a while.

That was the beginning of a subtle but beautifully realized exercise in fashion narrative. Trekking down his catwalk of sand, our traveler might have met soldiers (there was a militaristic something in army drill, gloves covered with metal buttons, and an officer's coat, which was actually in the lightest silk). He'd surely have encountered a tribal warrior or two, perhaps in a top made from an artful combination of scarves, or a coat whose sweep of fabric over one shoulder expertly combined duffel and poncho. And, at the end of the road, the East: drop-crotch pants, a frog-closed linen coat. In integrating two distinct forms of tribalism—the urban dweller, the desert nomad—Mihara found peace at last: hybrid fashion forms that felt new and desirable. His alchemy clearly infects his collaborator, London-based jeweler Husam El Odeh, who turned ordinary metal hardware, like beading nuts and bolts, into things of alien beauty.— Tim Blanks www.menstyle.com