PUMA by Mihara Yasuhiro
The 2012
Collection
WITH CEREMONY. Sport as his muse, Mihara re-explores PUMA’s warm-up trainers and joggers from the 70s and 90s, reconfiguring them with design details that hail athletic competition. Shoe heels and collars feature metallic leather (à la medals) fused against the Union Jack graphic or PUMA’s old school Suede. Other re-designs feature beveled silhouettes harnessed with plastic, covered in animal or reptile prints, and secured with PUMA’s Disc closure system. Apparel takes on similar colors, and unique drapes and folds, while bags embody the sporty-quirky ‘utilitarian panache’ that so defines Mihara.
The
Designer
Quirky king of avant-garde sneakers, Japanese fashion designer Mihara Yasuhiro gets his kicks by challenging the boundaries of sport and fashion. By the late 90s, he had established himself as a footwear force with his muted, monochromatic, and distinctly urban styles. He soon entered into apparel, and later his successful partnership with PUMA in 2000. He’s a designer equally amused by geometry’s proven formulas and the unpredictability of pedestrians in metropolitan Tokyo. Somewhere within this space Mihara’s boundless imagination strikes a balance to produce a whole – shirt, bag, or sneaker – that’s grounded in logic but geared to dodge reason and surpass expectation.
