Perfume to hold a Costume Museum exhibit in Hyogo from September

As part of their oddly and confusingly titled 15th&10th anniversary blowout this year, Perfume will be opening a costume museum. The exhibit will feature a selection of Perfume’s iconically horrid outfits from over the years, acting as an extension of their 2020 Costume Book.

And speaking of Perfume’s Costume Book; the artwork for the Costume Museum uses the exact same concept, which was art directed by Yuni Yoshida. And if some of you are having PTSD flashbacks to the special edition cover of Perfume’s 2018 album Cosmic Explorer, that’s because Yuni Yoshida art directed that shit too.

Dress and outfit museums can be really cool, but it all depends on the entire experience, and how everything is laid out and displayed. Dresses in glass boxes with a handwritten card pushing a cross sell, in a room with dead lighting is not appealing to me. But I’m sure it’s appealing to somebody.

Perfume did a gallery experience here in the UK in 2016 for Cosmic Explorer, and it was a bit shit. It was cool to be in a space full of Perfume related stuff in London. But it was just one small room of dresses on crusty mannequins, with flat screens playing videos. And the videos which were playing didn’t even correlate to the outfits. The only high point was that there was a chicken food truck a few feet from the venue, serving chicken tenders which were BOMB.

Hopefully what ever Perfume’s team do for this museum in Japan is an actual experience. Perfume have too creative a team for this costume museum to be some sterile bullshit. Also, let us be very real. Perfume’s dresses are ugly. And one thing I realised going to their gallery experience and also seeing back stage shots of Perfume in their dresses since they became active on Instagram, is that their outfits are made for specific types of lighting and also being seen from a distance. Even some of Perfume’s okay looking outfits look ragged up close and in standard fluorescent lighting. 

I have been wishing for Perfume to get a new style team for years. Perfume actually used to look fashionable during their Game and Triangle days, but that all shifted during JPN when we started to get these Super Sentai looking-ass stage outfits. But even back then, Perfume’s outfits at least looked half decent. Now I think their team goes out of their way for the outfits to just look hideous. Perfume don’t even be matching the pumps to the dresses no more. It’s just clumpy black boots and dead black pumps with every outfit. But as bad as the looks are, they are memorable and horribly iconic.

The Perfume Costume Museum will be held at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art from September 9 to November 26, which coincides with their P.T.A.15th&10th Anniversary tour.

Hyogo sure is an interesting place to hold such a thing. But I guess it makes a change from everything being based in Tokyo. And I’m sure Perfume fans in the Kansai region will appreciate it.

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