Anrealage SS26
A pulsing “heart ”, at once a symbol of love and vitality. Each beat marks out a unique being, life force crystallized into form. Sitting in the dim hush before the Anrealage SS26 show begins, you become acutely aware of your own heartbeat. It’s subtle at first, almost imperceptible, but as the lights fall and the first notes of the soundtrack tremble through the room, that rhythm feels amplified, shared. Around you, hundreds of hearts beat in quiet unison. This is where Kunihiko Morinaga begins; not with spectacle, but with the simple, radical insistence that every heartbeat matters and that difference itself is our most powerful common language.
For Spring/Summer 2026, Morinaga turns fashion into a living interface between art, technology, and humanity through a profound collaboration with HERALBONY, a creative company based in Tokyo and Paris. Morioka empowers artists with disabilities to thrive and reframe perception. In a season where “innovation” is often synonymous with speed and novelty, Anrealage slows us down, asking us to look again, and again, until we truly see.
Anrealage has always treated clothing as more than surface, it’s a vessel for questioning how we see, what we value, and the stories we choose to wear. This season, that questioning takes on new emotional depth. Drawing on the passion and sincerity HERALBONY’s artists bring to their practice, the SS26 collection celebrates openness to unfamiliar viewpoints. Eighteen artists contribute their own visual languages, each work an intimate impression of a deeply personal inner world. These are not “prints” in the usual fashion sense, but portals: boundless landscapes, abstract dreamscapes, and tender visual signatures that speak in color and movement where words might fail.
Patterned with prints produced by KYOCERA’s sustainable textile printer FOREARTH, each garment becomes a spontaneous act of creation and a singular visualization of being. Here, technology doesn’t flatten or sanitize, it amplifies nuance. FOREARTH’s near zero water usage and reduced energy consumption quietly underscore the point; awareness must extend beyond aesthetics to the methods and materials we choose. Sustainability isn’t a trend, it’s an ethical baseline for a future in which creativity and responsibility coexist. The result is a series of looks that feel like walking biographies. Visual testimonies of different ways of perceiving the world, held side by side on a single runway.
In SS26 the clothes are no longer garments, they’re organisms. Motifs and silhouettes appear to stir into life, as if stirred by some internal pulse. Wired flounces bloom into extraordinary, whimsical eruptions that recall baroque excess and psychedelic primitive organisms. A dress swells outward, rounded and buoyant, like an anatomical heart made tender and surreal. Hems of voluminous skirts, jackets, and capes undulate as models move, frilled edges trembling as if stirred by an invisible current.
Each piece feels like a distinct entity; not a “look” to consume, but a being to encounter. You watch a cape billow with sculptural precision, its surface alive with an artist’s lines; the garment seems to respond not just to the body wearing it, but to the space it passes through. In that exchange, between wearer, artwork, and environment, Morinaga locates fashion’s true potential; a dynamic field where perception is constantly in flux.
Continuing last season’s collaboration with Thomas Bangalter, Morinaga deepens his inquiry into what it means to be human in an age increasingly shaped by AI and technology. The soundtrack, created with HERALBONY, layers the steady rhythm of a heartbeat against quotidian “noises” made by people with disabilities. What could have been treated as background instead becomes a central narrative device. Breaths, murmurs, gestures translated into sound. These fragments weave into the score, forming an organic, evocative soundscape that refuses to sanitize or smooth out difference. In a cultural moment obsessed with frictionless interfaces and algorithmic polish, this sonic texture feels almost radical. It reminds us that humanity is not seamless. We are irregular, surprising, at times dissonant and that is precisely where our beauty lies.
At the core of Anrealage SS26 lies a question Morinaga has pursued for years: How does each being experience its environment in unique ways, and what happens when those perspectives collide or align? Building on the ethos of the Anrealage label, he uses clothing as a tool to probe the frontiers of perception. Two parallel worlds, two different visions; how we see, and how others see. As models cross and recross the runway, you begin to sense these dual planes of reality. A single print might read as chaos to one viewer and harmony to another. A swelling silhouette might suggest shelter to one body, exposure to another.
The show invites us to ask why we perceive different landscapes from the same place. Where does the boundary lie, and what is revealed when it is crossed? Art, here, is not an object of consumption, but a bridge. Fashion becomes a vessel for the heartbeat, honoring the beauty of difference as the purest celebration of life and resilience.
As the final look disappears backstage and the sound of heartbeats dissolves into applause, one thought lingers; awareness is not a trend, it’s a practice. It begins with noticing how a fabric feels on the skin, how a print makes you pause, how a garment can shift your understanding of another person’s inner world. Anrealage SS26 asks us to live with our eyes open, to recognize each heartbeat, ours and others’, as a unique, irreplaceable frequency. In doing so, it offers a vision of fashion not as escape, but as a deeply human technology. One that can connect, console, challenge, and ultimately, change us.
