Does living online expand your consciousness or quietly hollow it out? It’s one of the defining questions of our moment — and it turns out it was being asked in remarkably similar terms back in 1995, in the cyberpunk anime Ghost in the Shell. Designer Kunihiko Morinaga used that film, and specifically one of its most striking ideas, as the jumping-off point for his Anrealage show.

The concept he brought to the runway was thermoptic camouflage — the ability to render oneself effectively invisible by mirroring one’s surroundings. Morinaga and his team spent six months designing and programming LED garments that transformed to match the projections playing behind them on the runway, making the pieces appear to dissolve into the background. The effect wasn’t yet pixel-perfect, but it was genuinely impressive — a piece of science fiction made wearable, and nearly believable.

Once the models began to move and stepped out of alignment with their backgrounds, the illusion broke and the garments reappeared — this time transmitting streams of green-on-black code or conventional textile patterns across their surfaces. It was a neat metaphor built into the mechanics of the show itself: visibility and invisibility as states you move between rather than fixed conditions.

Before the LED pieces arrived, Morinaga presented an analogue collection that did much of the same intellectual work through more traditional means. Body armour and robotics were amplified into sculptural avatar silhouettes in Fortnite colour palettes, rendered in blurred neon. Outerwear carried elegant circuits and cascading code across its surface. The facial jewellery and metal nails looked less like adornment than interface hardware.

But scattered through the collection were deliberate glitches — ditsy floral prairie shirts, a one-legged fringed jean, clownish kick-hemmed striped trousers. These fragments of pre-digital counterculture were intentional, Morinaga explained through a translator: a dose of human spirit inserted into a collection otherwise defined by machine logic. The contrast made both elements feel sharper.

A number of pieces with smaller LED insertions were offered as commercially available, currently displaying the Ghost in the Shell logotype but programmable to show anything the buyer wants. Another technically ambitious and creatively grounded collection from a designer who consistently manages to make the future feel personal.