Designer Daisuke Obana is possessed of a cinematic imagination, which in the past he's turned toward Twenties vagrants (Spring 2011 -here) and Thirties mountaineers (Fall 2011 -there). So it made a kind of sense that for this season he turned to Saul Bass (1920-1996), the graphic designer turned cinema auteur, for inspiration. Saul Bass' genre was the movie title sequence; it's a somewhat narrow purview, but he elevated it to an art form, creating some of the medium's greatest efforts in the Fifties, Sixties, and beyond, for directors like Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese. You could spend a very profitable YouTube afternoon watching his reels. There's no doubt Daisuke Obana has. The off-kilter lines that the title sequence maker used in "The man with the golden arm" (1955) became the taped details on polos, sweatshirts and coats. The eerie eye of "Vertigo" (1958) was screened onto jean jackets, tees and shirts. "Psycho" (1960), "West Side story" (1961), "Anatomy of a murder" (1958) and "Ocean's 11" (1960) all got their nods, whether in literal borrowings or thematic winks. A section of quiffed, Shark-y greasers recalled 'West Side story', for example. The hazard of emulating an artist of the miniature -Saul Bass' sequences were usually less than five minutes long- is that your homage can wind up a bit shrunken, too. The presentation, fully and fabulously realized as it was (Daisuke Obana showed in a theater, in front of his own doctored version of Saul Bass' sequences with a jazzy score), couldn't quite jazz up the essential basic-ness of the collection. The titles on-screen, Obana-fied, came out witty and weird : "Ethel Mermaid ! Sad Caesar !" they promised. A little more of that oddity would've been welcome in the clothes. All worship and no play makes Sad a Sid boy.
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