Supreme has recently presented the upcoming drop collaboration with one of the greatest Japanese artists of all time, Toshio Saeki.

Saeki, born in Miyazaki, Kyūshū island in 1945 during the post-war reconstruction, spent the first part of his life in Osaka and then moved to Tokyo at the age of 24. In the midst of a radical change in Japan due to the increasingly strong Western influence, where dynamism and real cultural revolutions were taking place in various fields (manga, literature, cinema, etc.), Saeki develops a strong interest in the macabre and erotic universe of the ero guro.

The ero guro is a social, literary and artistic phenomenon born in Japan between the ’20s and ’30s of the twentieth century as a form of expression of modernist aesthetics, its characteristic is the combination of eroticism and elements macabre, grotesque, bizarre and often meaningless.

In the early 1970s, he began his work producing the first drawings that mixed eroticism and dreamlike elements that would make him one of Japan’s most famous artists. From then on, thanks to the publication of an insert by the magazine Heibon Punch that gave him enormous visibility, he published his first anthological book and began a 20-year collaboration with the erotic magazine SM Selecto.

His peculiar and personal aesthetic, which reinterprets traditional motifs and mixes them with his obsessions and fantasies, echoes the anxieties of his generation that grew up in the post-war era.

The poetics of Toshio Saeki combines the three main Japanese figurative traditions: the representation of demons, erotic shunga and brutal muzan-e but characterized by bright colors in the wake of pop art. Extreme and bizarre sexual acts, violent and in close contact with death, necrophilia, often the intercourse takes place between men/women and characters belonging to the Yomi, the world of the dead and spirits as a redivivo or demon.

Another recurring element is the depiction of shibari, the art of erotic binding that derives from hojojutsu, born in the fourteenth century as a means of captivity, where the aesthetic beauty of reading itself increased its prestige.

“The visions that I show people are the incomprehensible stuff of ‘ero’[erotica] and mystery… If the reality hidden in my soul — even if it is only the smallest fragment of it — is able to evoke something in the viewer, then my intention has been achieved”.

To pay tribute to Toshio Saeki, Supreme presented a capsule collection consisting of 3 items designed and developed together with the Japanese artist before his premature death in November 2019, the age of 74.

A work jacket, a hoodie and a pair of work pants have been decorated with a patchwork consisting of a series of colored and black and white Saeki-penned.
The work jacket and work pant are available in black and navy blue and the hoodie in black, white, green and red.

The Supreme x Toshio Saeki capsule collection will be released online on the Supreme webstore tomorrow, November 5th.