PARIS, Oct 14, 2002/ FWD/ --- By Thursday most of the heavy hitters from the fashion world had gone home, yet one designer's show still had enough gravitas to get such names as The New Yorker's Michael Roberts in the front row.

A graduate of the famous Bunka Fashion College, 33-year-old Japanese designer Hiroaki Ohya was picked up early by an impressed Issey Miyake who ended up making Ohya head designer of the Miyake line Haat.

Ohya didn't let his mentor down with his eponymous collection, producing a show that was calm, poetic and very Japanese in spirit.

With only three colors and evolving elements and proportions what Ohya did may not entirely have smacked of newness but was a solid statement.

Slowly, Ohya built a look as knitted shoulders on a raw seamed white dress found their way around the body as a draped sash or a folded belt.

The simplest decoration appeared as monotone badges on the hem of a black skirt or more complicated, but still light, as white ribbons that hung from trousers or opened up a jacket back.

Ohya's development of color moved from overblown magenta flowers on a black mesh knit skirt to a finale drenched in the color red.

Elongating poppy prints gave way to arrow-like slivers of organza on a winged top before eventually origami pleating became a huge carmine cloud like a child's paper Japanese lantern around the shoulders of a simple straight dress.

Japanese fashion may have moved on from this sort of conceptual work - with people like Yohji Yamamoto and Junya Watanabe embracing Adidas and Levi's respectively - but Ohya's collection demonstrates that in a hard world there will always be a place for poetry.