ArtGuest UserNovember 22, 2021shimoda masakatsu, dinosaurs, cdg, Comme des Garçons, salaryman, fashion, illustrator, artist, headgear, dinosaur skeletons, installation, runway, tfw, rakutentfw, sewing, garments, artmag, photography, Comme des Garçons Homme

Masakatsu Shimoda: From Salary Man to Dinosaurs On The Runway

Shimoda Masakatsu is an illustrator/artist, born in the Hyogo prefecture of Japan in 1967. After graduating from a design school in Tokyo, Shimoda aimed to become a Japanese salaryman.

However, he was unable to stay long at any of the companies he worked for, making his early years full of job transfers. He then went on to pursue many part-time jobs all over Japan, and before he realized it had saved up ¥1. 000.000 [~$10.000 USD]. With this money, he made the decision to take a trip to China, to eat good and stay at a nice hotel.

Shimodamasakatsu-dinosaurs-skeleton-commdesgarcons-headgear-garment-sabukaruonline

This trip ended up becoming a long journey of unplanned wandering throughout Europe and Asia. After 2 years, he made his return to Japan. In 1997, his roughly 250 colored pencil sketches of people he met along his travel got serialized in Weekly Asahi Graph for 1 year, kicking off his professional career as an artist.

Shimoda is widely known for his unique art style using colored pencils, but also creates dinosaur headgear from fabrics with sewing machines. Many of you may recognize his work featured in the @commedesgarcons Homme Plus Autumn & Winter 2018-2019 collection. Not only did the headpieces make it down the runway, they were also part of an installation which started at the COMME des GARCONS Aoyama store, and made it's way through many more of the brand's stores worldwide.

Each one of his dino-heads takes roughly 2-3 weeks until complete, with his collection now in the hundreds. He now even creates full dinosaur skeletons, which can also be viewed on his Instagram. Take a look at some of his wild works in the slides above.