He invited me to examine a tailored dress shirt with a check pattern. The check was not a different color, but a different texture. Laurini explained, “The check is created by needle-broken effect: the needle hooks the fabric and destroys it from the inside, but on the outside it remains unbroken. Thus the check becomes a different texture, which is further emphasized by over-dyeing the shirt with graphite, since the breakages absorb the dye differently from the rest of the shirt.”
    The mad-scientist approach is not the only one that Laurini champions. He also likes to think about reusing existing resources. “We are developing a story from recycled materials. For me, fabrics that have a history, the surface that changes through the years possess immediate power. They are old, but we give them a new life. I also like to build new fabrics from old ones.” Laurini handed me a knit blazer that was monochrome charcoal on the outside, but the inside was constructed from different pieces of fabric. I could not figure out how the same fabric could have not only different color and texture, but be continuous on the outside and have a patchwork on the inside. “For this garment,” he explained, “I started from recycling knit pieces, such as pockets, sleeves, and fronts that we initially discarded because these pieces did not pass our quality control. I collected all this material and I made a new fabric, fusing these pieces with a jersey base. This resulted in a new fabric, consisting of two layers. What makes it even more special is that there are no two pieces alike. Each piece has its own personality, just like people.”
    To continue with the reuse theme, most of Label Under Construction garments are reversible. In a way, it’s like getting two garments for the price of one. The reversibility is carefully thought out. All tags for each garment come attached to a metal wire that is easily removed from the garment. Because many of the knits are screen-printed, they are often a different color on each side. “Clothes-makers like to hide the inside, but, like with people, the inside is more important than the outside, and I wanted to show that. The knits are perfect for reversibility. Like the body that has no seams, many of my garments are seamless, so you can easily turn them inside out. Or, I make the seam as thin as possible, so it becomes just a line, merely visible to the eye. I collaborate with a screen printer who still uses silk-screening and print one piece at a time, each one comes out different.”
    Because Laurini insists on this complexity, he is finding himself in a privileged position of an experimenter. “When I start a new project, I don’t think, ‘I have to sell this’. I just follow my heart and my knowledge. Sometimes we sell only three or five pieces of a certain garment, but it would be the one most dear to me. And I am extremely happy that right now we sell a lot of difficult pieces, not just the basic ones.” This is certainly a welcoming statement in a fashion world that, having been beaten into submission by the recession, is becoming increasingly conservative.
    The buyers in the showroom seemed to support Laurini’s vision. “I have to control the size of my order,” the buyer from Lift, the iconic Tokyo boutique, said with a smile.