Block Party: In Conversation with Yuki Noto on Colour and Life in Melbourne

Our SS26 Block Party collection is inspired by the unexpected colours of Melbourne: beach houses, street art, fruit spilling from market crates, cafes decorated in primary colours. Colour has always been a powerful tool for communicating emotion, triggering memory, shifting a mood, superseding languages.  

Today, we’re in conversation with Yuki Noto, a multi-disciplinary Melbourne creative who moved from Japan a decade ago. Yuki’s a dancer, a yoga and shiatsu practicer, a model and a barista at Market Lane Coffee. Everything Yuki does personally and professionally seems to come back to the same two ideas: movement & community. We sat down with Yuki to talk all about colour, movement and what ten years in Melbourne has taught him. 

Rollie: Colour holds so much meaning, we're each drawn to different colours for different reasons. We wear a certain colour when we want to feel a certain way, and we're drawn to certain colours when we're in a particular mood. What does colour mean to you?

Yuki: "Colour is much more than something visual, or something we wear. My background is yoga, so I naturally think about the chakras and more recently shiatsu and Asian medicine, so the five elements and their different colours. I spent two years living in Sri Lanka and India, practising yoga and meditation every day and during that time I became much more sensitive to the people around me. I started to notice people almost like an aura. Not literally a colour, but a feeling of the energy they carry. Someone might be very blue, or really warm, orangey-red. I think our emotions have colour too and it can reflect how we're feeling or help bring us towards how we want to feel."

Rollie: We worked with you on Block Party and one of the first things we noticed was the way you moved: the shapes you create in front of the camera, the way you hold yourself. All your professions throughout life, dancing, yoga, shiatsu, modelling, being a barista, are about expressing yourself through your body and connecting with people. How does this concept evolve for you as you move through different mediums?

Yuki: "Movement has always been part of my life. Even as a child I was quite physical and loved sport, but dance was when movement really became a form of expression for me. It wasn't only about the movement; I was performing and being a dancer became part of the way I live. What I loved was that I could express something I couldn't put into words. Music brings out a feeling or an emotion and I could respond to that through my body. It's a bit like colour: red is never just one red, there's wine red, soft warm red, bright sunset red. Music and emotion felt like that to me, so many different shades I couldn't name, but I could express them through movement."

"Even feeling connected through dance, some days I felt really alone, disconnected from society," Yuki said, especially through the isolation of COVID. It's part of what drew him to modelling, after meeting his partner Jordan, a photographer and starting out as a shooting assistant. "That modelling brought me back to expression again." "Melbourne is so multicultural. Working in the CBD is a totally different crowd to Brunswick. It's interesting to connect with customers and coworkers who are all so different."

Rollie: You moved to Melbourne from Japan 10 years ago. How would you describe your life in Melbourne compared to life in Japan? If you were to give each city a colour, what would it be and why?

Yuki: "It's hard to give Japan and Melbourne just one colour. Both are colourful, but in very different ways. When I first think of Japan, I see something monochromatic, black and white and grey, more like a Zen temple. But when you look closely there are so many subtle colours inside that. For me, Japan feels almost like a watercolour painting: the colours are soft and subtle and there are so many tiny differences between them. Sometimes you can barely see where one colour ends and another begins. Melbourne is different. There are so many people, cultures and backgrounds, and each one feels distinct, like its own colour, but they all exist together in the same picture."

Yuki described the city of Melbourne like an Indigenous dot painting: "The canvas underneath is grey, but the dots are bright and individual." It's an image Yuki's also familiar with through Japanese artist GOMA.

Rollie: Let's chat through your rituals and daily practices. How do you keep yourself centred and grounded?

Yuki: "Literally yoga. But I try not to separate the practice from everyday life too much. I try to stay aware of my breath and be present with whatever I'm doing. I still get stressed and busy like anyone, but I try to notice what's happening inside me rather than reacting to it straight away."

Yuki’s practice has flowed over the years from long formal yoga sessions to now whatever suits the day. Lately he's added qigong (something close to tai chi) which he picked up only a few weeks ago and has quickly come to love.

"I don't want to escape from my life. I just need a moment that brings me back into it. I really enjoy this life. It's perfect."

A Market Lane Barista's Coffee Tips for Melbourne 

Rollie: You're a barista at Market Lane in Melbourne, an expert on Melbourne's drink of choice. What's something a customer should know when ordering a coffee? Any tidbits to share? 

Yuki: "I could probably talk about coffee all day, so this is a dangerous question for me. One thing I'd love people to know is that coffee is seasonal. It's an agricultural product, harvested at different times in different parts of the world. Even though we work hard to keep it consistent, it's never exactly the same. Instead of expecting your coffee to taste identical every day, try asking what it tastes like today. My other tip is to try filter coffee. Working at Market Lane made me fall in love with it. My body's getting older and I don't want too much caffeine or milk, just filter coffee."

Rollie: What do you love about Melbourne? How has it changed the way you see the world? 

Yuki: "I love the sky, it's so beautiful. Sometimes it's really grey and cloudy, but then there's a sunrise or a sunset that's so blue, or purple, orange, red. In Japan, the buildings are tall and I feel small. Here I feel big." 

"Each day, Jordan and I go for a walk with our dog. We always talk about the day, or a shoot, and then one of us says, ‘today's sky is so beautiful’." 

Rollie: Are there certain colours you reach for when it comes to shoes or clothes? How do you use colour in the way you dress? 

Yuki: "I naturally reach for colours close to nature: earthy tones, white, linen, soft hues. I don't really use colour to completely change who I am, I use it more to bring something out of myself." 

"If I'm meeting someone who's really funky and colourful, I'll lean into that too. I'm always thinking about how to connect with the person or the place." 

Rollie: Who inspires you in the world of fashion or art, in their use of colour? 

Yuki: "Definitely Jordan. We talk about art and photography every day, sometimes about the same photo for a month. Early on, I noticed Jordan was always photographing walls rather than the views everyone else pointed at. He said the light was so beautiful and that he was imagining how he might use it in a photograph one day. Now I look for walls too." 

His other answer is the Japanese artist GOMA, a former didgeridoo player who began painting after a serious car accident and became known for intricate dot work. "Something about it feels familiar to me, like it reminds me of what I experienced through meditation. That colour, or light, or feeling that's hard to put into words. This dot work feels familiar." 

Yuki was captured at Market Lane on St George’s Road, by partner & photographer, Jordan Drysdale. Yuki wears Gibson & Derby Step.