Mame Kurogouchi has always drawn from a deep well of personal geography, and for fall she went back to the mountains of Nagano where she grew up — not to recreate them literally, but to capture something more elusive: the quality of light and atmosphere that makes a landscape feel like it exists somewhere between the real and the imagined.

The collection was framed around two ideas held in tension. The first was misty mountain ridges seen through fog — present but softened, their outlines dissolving at the edges. The second was Wa-glass, a Japanese craft tradition that flourished from the 17th century through the early 20th, prized for the particular shimmer and slight imperfection that distinguished it from later industrial production. Both point to the same preoccupation: surfaces that reveal and conceal at once, the visible made uncertain.

Kurogouchi still travels to Nagano from Tokyo on weekends, and the collection feels like the product of someone who moves regularly between those two worlds — the urban and the wild — and has spent time thinking carefully about what lives in the space between them. Mountain peaks glimpsed through haze, frozen surfaces under ice, the texture of old glass: each became source material, translated into textiles through weaving, knitting, dyeing and printing with the kind of meticulous handiwork the house is known for.

The result was something that felt less like fashion referencing nature and more like an attempt to actually render it — a sartorial cartography of a particular landscape, at a particular hour, in a particular quality of light.