Underwear

A Fantastic, New Japanese Netflix TV Show

From time to time, a TV Show gets released, which surprises me. This happened last time in 2007 with Pushing Daisies, where I loved everything: the story, the actors, the sets, and every dialog. And now it happened again. I have a new favorite TV Show: Underwear (Underwear).

Underwear (アンダーウェア) or Atelier, is a mini-television series produced by Netflix and Fuji TV. You can add it to your watch list on Netflix here or watch a Trailer on YouTube.

It’s a story about a young girl called Mayuko (Mirei Kiritani), coming from a small town. She recently finished her studies in fabric design at the university and starts her first job at an exclusive custom tailoring lingerie store called Emotion in Ginza, Tokyo. It’s a small shop with a few designers, a few salesmen, and the owner of the workshop, who is a woman in her 50s (Mao Daichi), an honorary named Shachou (President) by her employees.

Atelier is a French word for a workshop or studio, a place, where professional artists work together and produce pieces of art. The atelier of the TV Show has multiple rooms, separated by doors, leading from the entrance hall, where customers get served, to the inner rooms of the owner. Additionally, it has a cellar with tons of fabric, accessories, and documents.

The 13 episodes provide a profound insight into Japanese culture, politeness, art, craft, and beauty. Every scene is choreographed with an eye for detail. The camera work is interesting and uses a variety of techniques. The actors are brilliant. It is a pleasure to follow the Japanese dialogs (subtitled), which can tell much with few words. Japanese is a language of context and nuances.

Every episode has at least one core scene, which transports a message or philosophy, accompanied by beautiful music.

I was surprised by this brilliant Japanese TV show and finished it in less than a week, and I’ll watch it again.