Kunihiko Morinaga founded Anrealage in Tokyo in 2003, joining “real,” “unreal,” and “age” into a single word. The name contains the tension that has driven the brand ever since: the everyday meeting the extraordinary, the familiar becoming strange. A garment may change color in sunlight, expand into a sphere, or be pieced together from fragments until it becomes something else entirely. Anrealage does not so much leave reality behind as quietly bend it.
Morinaga first showed in Paris in 2014. A year later, Sarah Andelman saw the brand’s SS 2016 collection, Reflect, at the Palais de Tokyo. She was then running Colette; Morinaga was beginning to establish Anrealage outside Japan. They stayed in touch, and their relationship eventually became a creative collaboration, beginning with the AW 2024 collection, Object.
Now, for Anrealage’s 25th Paris collection, the two have come together again. Just an Real Age opens in Paris on October 2, bringing the brand’s history into a single space at 76 rue de Turenne. Andelman has selected pieces from every Paris season, from SS 2015 Shadow to SS 2027 Skin, alongside 26 objects created around the alphabet — a new way of looking at the brand through the things that surround us.
The exhibition itself follows Anrealage’s particular logic of transformation. A huge sphere from Object hangs above a rotating selection of archive looks. Elsewhere, garments from “=” respond to ultraviolet light, shifting from one color to another. In the final room, music by Thomas Bangalter accompanies looks from Screen and “♥”. What once existed only as runway sound has now been pressed into a physical object, Songs for Anrealage, released by The Vinyl Factory.
There is something circular about the exhibition. Anrealage’s logo joins A and Z, collapsing the distance between beginning and end. Its 25th Paris collection brings the brand back to A — not as a return, but as the start of another cycle. For Morinaga, moving forward has always meant looking more closely at where you came from.
Ahead of the opening, hube spoke with Morinaga and Andelman about Japan and Paris, the everyday objects that become cultural artifacts, the relationship between technology and perception, and what it means to return to the beginning without repeating the past.
