Auralee Fall 2025 Menswear.mp3
Quiet luxury, quieter music.
Fashion is always telling us what “luxury” looks like, but have you ever considered what luxury sounds like? I’ve thought about it on and off for the past year, ever since I began regularly ripping fashion show videos into MP3 files to listen to offline. As I pressed play on these tracks, the music helped me envision my own personal runway — one cluttered with slow walkers and interspersed by stoplights.
What we hear sets just as much of a mood as what we wear, and these two elements intertwine. I can tell if the music doesn’t match my outfit; I have to change the channel, toggling between static to find the perfect station. Like the theater of a runway show, every outfit we put together is a performance. For this edition, I focused on how music supervisor Pilooski is shaping the runway soundtracks at Auralee, a Japanese brand that brings a bit of noise to the quiet of luxury fashion. Plus, I sample a feature I wrote for Wallpaper* last year about making runway music.
Welcome to Public Service.
Tuning into Auralee’s ambiance.
A little over a year ago, Japanese designer Ryota Iwai staged the first official fashion show for his label, Auralee. Though he’d launched the brand in 2015 in Tokyo and been presenting on the Paris Fashion Week calendar since 2019, this Fall 2024 collection heralded a new chapter for the cult-favorite label. Real fashion heads had already been tuned into what Iwai was cooking, but there was a gravitas in moving from presentations to actual, fully realized runway shows in the fashion world. Pretend to be shocked, but image matters in this image-obsessed industry — and few images are as strong as the Vogue Runway recap screenshots (for better or worse).
The gambit worked. Iwai was voted one of fashion’s most underrated designers by Vogue Runway readers in their 2024 industry poll, and his shows and clothes have become fashion week standouts. Auralee’s wave of enthusiasm reminds me of another critical darling: Simone Belotti, whose transformation of Bally over the past year and a half has almost certainly landed him the creative director role at Jil Sander (to be announced in March). At first glance, Auralee could be castigated to the “quiet luxury” box thanks to its exorbitant price tags for the seemingly “normal” clothing it makes. As a recent NYT headline explained: “Normcore Never Died. It Just Got More Expensive.” The expense comes from the exacting attitude toward fabric that has made Auralee stand out. Read through a runway recap or interview and you’ll see journalists note the extra soft South African kid mohair, New Zealand wool, and Peruvian alpaca; go to the brand’s Instagram and you can see Iwai and a crew drive into the grasslands of Mongolia to visit the nomads who produce his cashmere. “Through fabric and natural materials especially, you are able to convey so much feeling, emotion and beauty,” he told Hypebeast in 2021.
I must admit, I was not a real fashion head on this one. Auralee was not on my radar until late last year when I sat down for an interview with Cédric Pilooski, a musician who has made the fashion show soundtrack for Auralee’s three shows thus far. Though Pilooski spent most of the interview discussing a longstanding collaboration with Lemaire’s namesake designer, Christophe Lemaire (and co-designer Sarah-Linh Tran), he mentioned that, like Lemaire, Iwai focuses “a lot on the idea of music in terms of communication,” noting that the Japanese designer is “very precise.”
With this in mind, I began to immerse myself in the sights and sounds of these recent runway collections to better understand the brand. What does luxury sound like for Auralee? It’s light, breezy, and often as gentle as the super-soft fabric of the clothes. It follows a certain formula but is interesting enough not to be formulaic. The “Auralee mix” and the brand’s subtle twist on elevated “everyday” clothing are simpatico; the brand's sound and sight offer a palatable vision of ease and confidence, which is to be expected if you can afford to wear anything they produce. Quiet luxury begets quiet music.
Of the three runways, I found the most recent Fall 2025 menswear show to be the most compelling in terms of both music and clothing. The show opens with a twist on the tailored business suit: a leather jacket zipped tight and layered between a shirt and tie and a blazer. As he walks forward, a powerful blast of melody from a saxophone sets the tone. The track — “Hope” by Caleb Arredondo — is complicated and quick but soulful. The combination of the model and music makes me imagine this businessman leaving the office to rush off toward a jazz bar for drinks. His blazer hung up, his leather jacket unzipped, his tie slack and a button or two undone at his collar. The rest of the looks are just as engaging. Iwai is a master of layering and color; Look 12’s red dress over a light blue blouse and Look 16’s double-striped-knit sweaters are simple but strong. His accessories feel effortlessly chic, like the winter mittens dangling from a string as a makeshift necklace.
The music, meanwhile, hovers like a cloud, never casting a shadow over the show. Much of the mix is ambient and focused on only a few instruments. Arredondo’s saxophone gives way to a mix of almost prancing woodwind instruments over light synths in “Architectural Plans” by Elori Saxl before picking up tempo with Laura Misch’s track “Climb,” which brings the trembling saxophone back. It takes nine minutes for any vocals to drift into the show. “Only bored as I get older,” Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox sings on “He Would Have Laughed.” The track drifts around as Cox’s verses give way to boisterous melodies, capping off the runway show.
Had I not watched the runway show or heard these tracks, I never would’ve daydreamed about the lives imbued in these looks. And that’s the entire point of fashion: daydreaming. Nobody would attend a show that’s a carbon copy of life as it is outside the walls of the show. Thanks to Pilooski’s mixes and the runway videos, I’m able to fully grasp the vision that Iwai is bringing to Auralee. Like swiping past disembodied screenshots from a favorite film or TV show, viewing shows solely through slideshow images is like pressing something tangible between pages of a book. Flattening culture into a consumable, social media-friendly format takes away all of the richness. And without depth, how are we meant to dream?
Excerpt: Pilooski on the key to crafting the perfect runway soundtrack.
Before I get to this sampling of my feature for Wallpaper*, let me just say: if you’re an editor reading this, please keep in mind I have a lot of material from my conversations that I’d love to place with other publications. Hint hint.
Cédric Marszewski always knew he was born to make music. The French artist, who performs under the moniker Pilooski, has made music since he was 16. His early experiments with electronic music morphed into touring with his band, Discodeine, and releasing ‘loads of edits and remixes’ in the 2000s. What he didn’t expect was just how ingrained he’d become in the fashion world – all thanks to a chance meeting Christophe Lemaire while DJing a party in 2010.
‘From the start, our first encounter was based on the love for music we both had,’ Pilooski recalls, emphasizing that in an industry where sound designers more commonly propose tracks to designers in a one-way process, his work with Lemaire is truly collaborative. ‘He has a vision of where to go with music.’
‘People tend to remember the beginning and the end: the entrance of the first model and then the finale’
In the nearly 15 years since their first meeting, Pilooski has been the (somewhat) secret weapon behind Lemaire’s stints at both Lacoste and Hermès, plus the designer’s own namesake brand he now co-runs with partner Sarah-Linh Tran. Pilooski’s deft sonic touch can now be felt in the music made for not only his longtime collaboration with Lemaire but also through more recent partnerings, with the Japanese label Auralee and Korean brand EENK.
No matter what brand he’s working with, the secret to a successful mix boils down to the flow. ‘People tend to remember the beginning and the end: the entrance of the first model and then the finale. That’s very cliche, but that’s true, so I’m always trying to focus on these things,’ he says before quickly noting that ‘the most important thing is how you create your story with different elements. It’s a collage.’