Under the Radar, but Cranked to 11

NEW YORK — It was dark and loud on Monday night in Ideal Glass, a performance space on East Second Street, the site of the first solo presentation by a little-known, prodigiously talented menswear designer named Kozaburo Akasaka.

Nine p.m., the last show slot of the day, is not generally a sought-after one during New York Fashion Week, but you got the feeling that Akasaka would have been just as happy to have gone even later.

“I couldn’t have the vision to do a normal runway show,” he said. He hasn’t, in fact, done any shows or events at all. For this, his debut, he insisted on a psychedelic happening, a crowd milling and a few brave souls lightly moshing, to the throbbing drone of a Chilean psych band called Föllakzoid.

Its lead singer, Domingo García-Huidobro, in a velvet topcoat, beaded choker and the high-water, emphatically flared jeans that are one of Akasaka’s signatures, took the stage, doffed his coat, lit a cigarette and assumed a stance of rock-god lordliness. A cigarette indoors, in this town? Rock’s not dead!

Akasaka seems determined, in his reticent way, to prove that it isn’t, at least not if you know where to look. His label, Kozaburo, is young — Dover Street Market came around early, picking up his graduate collection — and hasn’t always been easy to find, though apparently he has just been tucked away in his live/work studio in a lovely brownstone in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, with a bamboo garden in the back.

In any case, those who look like what they see. He beat out many better-known names to receive a special award from the LVMH Prize in 2017.

Akasaka, who worked for Thom Browne before striking out own his own, is a rock ‘n’ roll acolyte with an elegant streak. He designs massive-heeled boots that recall the heyday of glam, and has a durable love of velvet. There are jeans high and tight enough to make the cover of “Sticky Fingers” jealous, though Akasaka’s are made in Japan, like almost all of his collection, save the boots (cowboy, Texas; glam rock, Italy).

He mixes Americana with traditional Japanese elements, like the sashiko stitch that decorated some of his jackets. Look closely and Japanese calligraphy appeared, lettered by one of his old friends — once a bandmate, now a Buddhist monk.

Friends of the designer walked amid the crowd, occasionally stopping to be photographed, models by arrangement rather than profession. The easiest way to tell them from the rest was that they reliably looked cooler than everybody else.