LONDON, United Kingdom — The screen of a switched-off phone. A blank mirror. You're no longer reflected. You're no longer connected. You're #nothing.

There’s no way anyone was going to accuse Mihara Yasuhiro of an overload of optimism after the show he offered in London on Sunday afternoon. Once, he showed us inspiring humanist visions of triumph over adversity, man and machine working together to make statements that were unlike anything else in fashion. What happened? Despair seems to have become his default. So maybe Mihara is just smarter than the rest of us. But it was tough to sit through a show, soundtracked by Jan and Naomi’s intense, grinding drone (trance and drone – shall we call it Trone?) that seemed so relentlessly nihilistic.

Mihara said he’d created a fictional band #blankmirrors as a comment on the vast sucking maw of e-culture. Don’t Tag Me was the message on the clothes. They were shaped by his signature slice-and-dice approach. Once upon a time, it yielded glorious hybrids (Autumn/Winter 2011’s duffel-coat-cum-cape thing will always be One That Got Away for me). But here, the joyous iconoclasm of that notion had surrendered to a pessimistic make-do-with-the-ruins attitude.

For the "band" merchandising, Mihara claimed inspiration (and borrowed visuals) from Alien Sex Fiend, Specimen, the peculiar substratum of 80s bands that mutated punk into camp grotesquerie. He chose a clammy underground carpark — deep underground – for his venue. Outside, a phonebox was papered with fliers for a #blankmirrors gig. It was proof of Mihara's incredible eye for detail. It also underwrote his appetite for irony. This collection was scarcely the first time he'd invoked nihilism as a reference point. So maybe that's what I was missing. The whole thing was actually a tongue-in-cheek vamp on gloom and doom. That's something I could live with.