Junya Watanabe (Q4880)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Junya Watanabe is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Junya Watanabe |
Junya Watanabe is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Donna Summer’s 1977 song “I Feel Love” served as the unexpected soundtrack at Junya Watanabe’s show—the alluring disco message was surprising, coming from such an elusive, mysterious designer. Yet it was the first song produced with a modular Moog synthesizer, hinting at a futuristic mood. It strangely synced with the edgy metallic glamour of the show.Watanabe is a master of creating exceptional shapes by assembling just a few elements, repeating them obsessively to craft virtuosic, single-minded designs—wondrous mash-ups where forms seem to reinvent themselves throughout, transmuting into a continuous flow of shape-shifting combinations. This season, he worked exclusively with “modern recycled materials,” as per his press notes, incorporating reflector patches, backpacks (a collaboration with Innerraum bags), soundproofing foam, and what appeared to be rubber-carpeted car interiors.The emphasis was on strong silhouettes, unusually feminine considering Watanabe’s typically abstract repertoire. The opening looks were striking, sculptural, and shiny creations made from reflective silver foil. They evoked luminous creatures in armor and featured broad shoulders with cinched waists jutting out into voluminous, bouncy round or angular pointy crinolines crafted from poufed clusters of rucksacks secured with buckled safety straps, or from what seemed like flattened rubber motorcycle tires. Balloon sleeves and square-cut collars were mounted on hourglass numbers concocted from elliptical assemblages of technical ribbons; cocoonish capelets poufed out from stark geometric-shaped opera coats, where patchworks of reflectors and soundproofing foam agglutinated into beauteous, surreal specimens—evening frocks for a galactic sci-fi party. The shine—from sequins, translucent fabrics, and reflective surfaces—radiated an outward energy, exuding an absurd, incongruous yet festive sense of joy. In his typical iconoclastic, cerebral way, Watanabe sent out a laconic note that said: “I feel that abnormal clothing is necessary in our everyday life.” Indeed.
28 September 2024
The final sheet of protective plastic was pulled from the red carpet runway. Someone fired up the lights just as someone else’s hastily-extinguished cell phone alarm chirped from near the photographers. Rain drops and angry traffic thudded against the window panes. Welcome to Paris Menswear Friday: the start of the season’s end (at least for menswear).Dedicated Watanabe watchers might have thought the rouge runway was a nod back to his Sapeursshow. Once this one started, we saw it sort of was. The designer was traversing the territory of display dressing in his distinct and unconventional way.The typically succinct creator’s statement gave us this: “I have used denim and patchwork a lot in my past collections, but this time I tried to go further in my exploration to find new discoveries.” Watanabe’s quest to the punkier extremes of formal wear started from a basecamp of wool evening suits patched in sometimes embroidered denim, or evening suits that were fashioned almost entirely from wider patches of denim. Counterbalancing the special occasion shine of patent shoes by Tricker’s (the best) were paparazzi-proof sunglasses edged in a halo of pierced grommets.The next square Watanabe landed on was a phase of evening suiting patched in tartan as well as that sometimes frayed black denim. Then a white-stitched Type III denim jacket made in collaborations with Levi’s was extended into a frock coat whose stitching expressed the sartorial skeleton of the tailored original that was its inspiration. Check patched blue denim evening wear, then black denim evening wear bolstered by white thread machine-applied patches followed.Next was an extended phase of washed and sometimes distressed blue denim pieces that deconstructed Levi’s paradigms, sometimes blending them directly with black formalwear fabrics. Especially enjoyable was the foreshortened denim opera cloak. That tired Canadian tuxedo gag begged for one more airing. Three canonical tour T-shirts edged with foulard print shifted the lens before a focus on evening shirting that messed with the bib and tucker of tradition with more patching and customization.A cut to Dusty Springfield’s “Spooky” took us to a summery five-look final section that completed Watanabe’s ascent in mostly white variations of what had come before, with added workwear. This was a great Watanabe wander across positively abnormal formality, served with some fresh New Balance sneakers on the side.
21 June 2024
Public art is by necessity almost always sculpture: robustly solid-state forms that we can move around on the streets. Today Junya Watanabe appeared to propose the perfectly sensical hypothesis that our chosen clothing is a form of personal public art determined through our own daily curation. He did this by inserting or integrating (relatively) conventional ensembles of garments within defiantly non-ergonomic abstract expressionist forms.So there were looks that seemed related maybe to Richard Serra, Alexander Calder, Elsworth Kelly, or even Pablo Picasso. Triangular prisms and intersected triangular prisms grew from the first few looks, and were then eclipsed by looks entangled in overlapping knotted clusters of irregular shaped black panelling. Sometimes belts and straps—the rivets and girders of clothing—collapsed into or melded with the sculptural shell forms. In knitwear pointed shoulders provided a more conventionally unconventional form of radicalized silhouette.Most of the looks within the more sculptural elements were all black: keynotes included woolen topcoats, black knitwear layers, and gently light-catching pants. Then a fascinating section played mumsy rose print dresses under bikers and topcoats which—if scaled up massively and fitted out in iron—could have served as temporary pavilions at some chin-scratching art biennale. Sections that looked to apply this collection’s clothing as public art thesis to garments shaped in moto-style armored panels or under punk-studded leather shapes followed. A faux fur cloak over a Levi's-collaboration black denim and poly-leather patched skirt seemed to challenge us to see this only slightly more “normal” ensemble as a dynamic sculpture curated through both the movement of the wearer and their choice of garments.Warhol reckoned that fashion is more art than art is: this collection flipped that position to contend that art is more fashion than fashion is. It all depends on how you wear your art—or see your fashion.
2 March 2024
This has been a standout season for progressive tailoring, packed with different proposals for the direction in which the most classical current form of masculine attire is set to swing next. None, though, was quite as radical as Junya Watanabe’s manifesto this morning. His position was that the jacket should be unified with the pant, and he demonstrated it with a series of archetypal jackets that were grafted at the skirt with what appeared to be unstitched pants, creating gently surrealist morning coats. Later he added outerwear, which at first appeared to be classically fabricated and constructed overcoats. A second look revealed that the arms had often been embedded into the body of the garment.A transgenerational gravity was created by constructing newly classical garments in forms associated with menswear genres and in collaborations with brands that have a younger demographic. As well as a Palace baseball cap, this show contained what is surely the first ever Palace opera cloak. The closing look, one of 12 collaborations here with Levi’s, saw a pair of washed black 501s grafted into an evening jacket. What looked like a Y2K-era Levi’s Red work jacket was morphed with an old school twisted jean into a gown. A black Carhartt chore jacket and work pant were blended in a similar procedure. Other collaborations this time round included with Brooks Brothers and New Balance.“I am reinterpreting men’s suits with my own ideas,” said Watanabe toVogue Businessbefore this show. In the press note delivered after it, he added: “I wish for men of different generations to wear these suits.” As we watched his reimagined tailoring pass in front of us, plaster dust kicked up by the models floated in shifting rivulets through the spotlight beams that illuminated this designer’s enlightening runway.
19 January 2024
Outside the Junya Watanabe show this morning, the 9th arrondissement corner where it took place was thick with the Japanese designer’s fans. They turn up in their new-season Junya or treasured vintage pieces and pose for the street style photographers who set their alarms early to document the unfolding scene. The passersby in buses and on bikes stare agog or pull out cameras of their own. Most other brands have to rely on PR and marketing teams to manufacture these kinds of moments. It’s rare to inspire the devotion that Watanabe does, and that’s because few other designers have been able to construct such a distinctive aesthetic.Watanabe is a designer-historian, lifting references from leading talents of the past and co-opting subcultures from punk to new wave to craft his sui generis creations. He’s also one of the industry’s most enthusiastic collaborators, teaming up with brands all over the fashion spectrum to put his collectible spin on wardrobe essentials. This was a collection where he channeled his mathematician’s genius for combining geometric shapes with wearable sculptures.The show began with a trio of all-black pieces more like cartoon explosions than clothing, made from triangles and tubes jutting out at all angles in a material that looked close to fabric upholstery, necessary to hold the extreme shapes. “Creating objects, not clothes” was the four-word précis he gave in a postshow email. As the show progressed, Watanabe bent those tubes into less confrontational curved shapes and constructed similar volumes out of scuba neoprene in bright shades of blue and red with a little more bounce and give.The leather biker jackets that are brand icons here were constructed like origami, with architectural shoulders and ghost folds crisscrossing the front and back. From there, Watanabe shifted into unrinsed dark denim, stitching it like fractals or the facets of a diamond. He might be the first designer ever to make jeans with hip panniers. Next came tweed bouclé, a nod to one of those leading talents of the past, but deconstructed and put back together again as only Watanabe can do. These were clothes, not objects. With their dangling appendages they were eye-catchingly strange. Just the way his fans like them.
30 September 2023
Alpha Industries. Baracuta. Bates. Brooks Brothers. C.P. Company. Carhartt (presumably Work in Progress). Filson. GREGORY. MXDVS. Oakley. Palace. Patta. Reigning Champ. Levis. Mackintosh. Maison Kitsuné. Lousy Livin (in some amusing shorts).Phew. Yet again, Junya Watanabe presented a show that mingled his mainline and eYe diffusion line, and which was packed with enough collaborators to fill a Pitti pavilion: there were 18 commercial collabs (plus two styling-only loaners) in a show that ran to 29 looks. Among the hottest mash-ups were the indigo denim fronted, tin cloth backed Filson Mackinaw, a Palace patched field jacket and flight suit, and a hoodie with grommet lined cropped sleeves bearing the inimitable signature of Shawn Stüssy.However none of the above, Watanabe indicated via missive from backstage, were his primary collaborative concern this season. Instead he suggested that his main emphasis was to enmesh his menswear practice with his womenswear. It was telling that March’s most recent Watanabe womenswear show also had 29 looks, and there were certainly some interesting parallels between the two. Again the designer appeared to construct new forms from pre-existing elements of clothing sourced from technical wear, trenches, denim and bikers.Instead of Led Zeppelin, these forms were this time soundtrack by Pink Floyd (“Sheep,” “Pig,” and “Dogs” with accompanyingAtom Heart Mothercow-butt band tee). This in part meant the clothes seemed less intensely urgent, dystopian and possibly borderline political and more exercises in intricate creativity performed for their own sake. The result was wearable jigsaw puzzles in which all the pieces have been fitted together in order to make an image different to the original from which they were cut. The sheer eclecticism of the collaborative collage made this show the equivalent of a tasting menu rather than a single dish consisting of multiple ingredients. What every dish shared was the imprimatur of Watanabe’s signature connoisseurship.
24 June 2023
With Robert Plant’s psychedelically-lilted, rubber band vocals on Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”— “all will berevEEEyeled”—floating through the sunlit, mist-filled Oratoire du Louvre around us, Junya Watanabe presented a fierce cast of future female travelers in both time and space. From a rough plywood backdrop six models emerged and stood, facing the audience right and left. Wearing gold chained black meshed masks and studded cowboy boots, their silhouettes were defined by ostentatiously technical habits, hanging with D-rings, strapping, carabiners, mesh sections and all the other accouterments of contemporary exploration wear.Then unfolded the show, which Watanabe said was inspired by the lyrics from “Kashmir.” Interestingly, he added, he did not want it to be termed a “collection.” Perhaps the fact that he specified details of a customization collaboration that we saw none of on the runway was an indication that there was much more to see in the showroom. Still, as a piece of evocative fashion theater, this was a diverting morning watch. Just like Robert Plant—who had never visited Kashmir when he wrote the lyrics, which were based instead on a trip through southern Morocco —Watanabe used his source material as an imaginative point of departure.Watanabe is clearly a Led Head of some vintage: his Spring 2006 show was also informed by the band. Where that show was a workwear ode, however, this one was a bleaker, dystopian projection uplifted by its sense of dark romance. As at menswear, Watanabe worked with Innerraum to craft protective looking masks and spaceship-like bags. The models were mostly clad in what looked like disassembled and rebuilt variations of motorcycling jackets; Lewis leather type classicRebel Without a Causewear, more modern kevlar and nylon pieces, and on one occasion a long shearling lined coat-dress that resembled a dispatcher’s military piece from the early 20th century. At the end these gave way to what looked like down-filled buffers that wrapped around the body in abstract shapes: not a million miles from Rick Owens’s recent donuts. Although less bountifully garlanded in feature-driven ornament than the opening six looks, the bulk of the showpieces glinted with bronze-colored tie-rings, rippled with fringe, with nubbles of studs. Pleated leather skirts and leather leggings topped high or low versions of those opening studded boots.
A little (the original)DunemeetsMad Max, this fantastic pilgrimage of a collection took you to a dark, brooding, and beautiful place.
4 March 2023
We talk about collaborative practice between brands in fashion—A x B = new!—as if this in itself is a fresh phenomenon. But creatively unmaking then rebuilding existing designs by other brands, before then inserting them in his own collections, has been a central part of Junya Watanabe’s menswearmonozukurifor over 20 years now. As if to remind us of that, this morning Watanabe presented a collection packed full of collab designs both new and from his archive. This was probably the most brand-populated single show that menswear has ever seen—there were a total of 18 other labels on view—and if all the pieces go into production this will be a grail-heavy season for Watanabe-heads (just as long as they want them in black).The list included Oakley, New Balance, Timberland, and Stepney Workers Club for shoes. Levi’s, North Face, and Carhartt, long-standing clothing compadres, were joined by Brooks Brothers (for a customized blazer and shirt), Bates (motorcycle jacket-blazer), Mystery Ranch (a supercool technical jacket with the brand’s ultralight portage built in), Haglofs, collab-ologists Palace, Karrimor, Nanga, Alpha Industries, and Champion. A note sent out afterwards said that the starting point for this collaboration of collaborations was the work of Berlin-based Innerraum, a brand working to incorporate the found aesthetic of futuristic protective gear into a luxury context.So this show was a choir of many voices, but with one very distinct choirmaster. It was impressive how Watanambe corralled so many different voices into a lineup whose progression was logical and language consistent. It started with double-cuffed suiting featuring gently articulated knee and shoulder sections, then vaguely punkish zipped pants. As caps or harnesses the models wore Innerraum inspired exo-skeletal accessories that gradually became more elaborately melded with model and outfit: eventually we got a full ski-style back support. This was appropriate, because after the suiting Watanabe broadened his range into oversized work/streetwear silhouettes that were reminiscent of snowboarding gear, before inhaling again into finely-drawn and less enveloping shapes.That the collection was near-universally black helped his cause, but nonetheless the manner in which Watanabe imposed coherence in an offering so packed with other aesthetic voices was impressive. At the very last we saw a high-collared panel-patched jacket in a polite charcoal check.
Unlike the double-cuffed opening series, this piece’s sleeves were turned up to reveal the tiniest tantalizing flash of pink and blue lining. That flash seemed to semaphore that while a multicolor edition of such a multi-collab outing might have proved overwhelming, Watanabe would have—and maybe even next season will be—remaining in control of hismonozukuri.
20 January 2023
The familiar flashing camera sounds of Duran Duran’s ’80s hit “Girls on Film” kicked in and a pair of New Romantic kids emerged from the side of Junya Watanabe’s runway, their hair crimped into mohawks and wedges and their makeup airbrushed on like a Patrick Nagel portrait. This was Watanabe’s first live women’s show in Paris since early 2020, and for his comeback he made a lively and enlivening tour of his codes, from deconstructed tailoring to the punk-rock badassery of chains and pearls.Those first two looks set the silhouette: wide, ’80s-shouldered capes and a skinny leg punctuated by a sharp-toed boot dressed up with those chains and pearls. Some of the capes were caught by a belt in the front or cut like a trad two-button blazer, but turn them around and it was a different story: all swagger and sweeping shapes, punctuated by fabric selvedge. Shirting got the Junya treatment too; split personality button-downs were well fit on one side and unstructured on the other, a clutch of pearls holding them in place, while pleated shirtdresses came in Klaus Nomi–ish inverted triangles. About those pearls: They were worn as necklaces and integrated into garments, almost like belts, creating the kind of askew volumes Watanabe likes.He seemed to be making a case for more glamour and more drama, but without disconnecting from the realities of daily life. The jeans, whose upturned cuffs revealed a flash of red tartan, were made with Levi’s, and the color-blocked and patchwork jackets came together with Komine, a Japanese racing-gear maker.A colleague living in Tokyo saw something more here. Japan is a country that has been made sleepy, first by pandemic isolation and second by the July assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe. The extended lockdowns have kept Watanabe and his fellow Japanese designers from leaving the country, and traffic has been slow to begin flowing in the opposite direction too. So if it’s a call for sartorial drama, it’s one aimed first and foremost at his home country. There’s no mood elevator quite like a new frock, or a frock coat, as the case may be.
1 October 2022
“Same as it ever was...”Junya Watanabe has a cheering, practical sense of humor about owning the fact that his menswear collection is what it is, more or less on repeat. That line from the Talking Heads’s “Once In a Lifetime” seemed to hang over his show like a knowing aural wink to his fans.Yet embedded in the down-to-earth, anti-fashiony masculinity of Watanabe’s label is a bloke-to-bloke fellowship of collecting objects with some sort of authentic provenance. Each seasonal set of releases is effectively an intricate construct of ‘authentic’ souvenir collaborations with brands and artists. This one, very obviously, was a patchwork of Pop Americana—a long list of familiar licensed graphic “quotes” from the estates of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jean Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring, and the logos of Coca-Cola, Honda, and Netflix.Watanabe’s cheerfully practical wardrobe for the everyday everyman doesn’t have to shape-shift every season. Why would fans want it to, when the cut and feel of his cool blazers, shirts, jeans, and parkas have reached the point of being a trusted ideal? He squares that circle with the added collector-geek attraction of all the many and storied specialist branded utility garment and accessory manufacturers he works with season after season.Lifting the bonnet of his collection, those in-the-know will admire the complexities of Watanabe’s co-engineering with the likes of Carhartt, Levi’s, Karrimor, Il Bistonte, New Balance, and more. All this, as Watanabe spelled out on his invitation, holds the virtue of “something real, something that has history, that has traditional shape. Our kind of originality.”
24 June 2022
A fierce, monumental cape, an almost pyramidal fusion of many motorcycle jackets materialized, and then disappeared. That was the opener for Junya Watanabe’s fall women’s collection, a strong distillation of all his talent, in a video piece shot on a white set in Tokyo.It was a kind of poetic gothic essay on Watanabe’s obsessions with generic army surplus and American motorcycle leathers—and with the finesse and drama of golden-age French haute couture. He sent a note saying that he concentrated on working on three garments: “the motorcycle jacket, the bomber, and the checked jacket.” Models appeared and disappeared, sometimes replicated, sometimes frozen for a second, before they turned and vanished.Essentially, the hauntings of two alien 20th century cultures were dramatically made manifest as 21st century streetwear. The volumes of Cristobal Balenciaga—cocoons, extravagant bishop sleeves, stole necklines, stately robes. The corsetry, peplums and crinolines of Christian Dior. Even, the swathes and drapes of possibly an earlier, Victorian time: all these inhabited the materials and the character of Watanabe’s collection.We’ve seen this all along from Watanabe, of course. But this time his thought process seemed to have hit a flow-state. There was a reason behind that. Watanabe named the collection “the spiraling of winter ghosts,” after a subtitle of a track on an 1980s album by David Sylvian and Holger Czukay. Ambient sound taken from the album filled the video—experimental music which was apparently made by letting the instruments ‘play’ themselves.Watanabe habitually quotes from the extensive catalogues of the artists and genres he admires and studies as as a fan. This time, though, there was no visual “quote.” Nothing that seemed to refer to David Sylvian’s former life as the glam, blond, floppy-haired leader of the New Romantic band Japan, though that might’ve been a temptation.Instead he was motivated by the improvisational process of Sylvian and Czukay’s collaboration. Maybe it strengthened and encouraged him follow his instincts more intensely. Or possibly, this time, it was just easier to see what he does. The video techniques—momentarily freezing, or zooming in to show back views and profiles—described every zippered seam, layer, and patchwork in detail. Just for once, it was a better thing to watch online than it could have been in a runway show. But still, Paris misses him.
11 March 2022
Here’s one for the Gen X-ers: a fashion reprise of Jamiroquai’s 1996 “Virtual Insanity” video. “Remixing the style of Jay Kay” was Watanabe’s title for it, with further explanation: “The name Jamiroquai was derived from the combination of jam session and the name of a Native American tribe, the Iroquois.” As a designer (himself born a Gen-Xer), Watanabe has built his men’s collection on the framework of multiple collaborations with brands and musicians, who in his mind resonate as touchstones of authenticity.That’s much more complicated when it comes to collaborating with Jay Kay, as will immediately hit anyone who sees Mexican serapes and Navajo blanket patterns patchworked into Watanabe’s jackets. In his ’90s acid jazz heyday, Jay Kay—a white British Mancunian—“established his own style…showing appreciation not only for the Iroquois but various indigenous cultures of the world,” as Watanabe’s press release has it.That kind of white-hipster cultural appropriation equals opprobrium today—a discomforting (at the least) focus for Watanabe to want to pick on. In fact, the designer’s press release states, “in order to realize some of our ideas, we invited participation from the Secretariat of Culture of Mexico, as well as the renowned Pendleton Woolen Mills.” According to the Culture Secretariat’s website, the Mexican government arm, “works in favor of the preservation, promotion, and dissemination of heritage and cultural diversity. In addition, it supports the artistic creation and the development of creative industries.” Pendleton Woolen Mills, a company founded in Oregon in 1863, has a long history of trading its blankets with the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Questions about authenticity of sourcing and the ethics around that surely have to be squared before any designer sets foot on this kind of territory.Watanabe might have pre-empted some of them; but then again, the fact that the fashion-copying, bowdlerisation, or theft, of these patterns—which has been rife at the dead-end cheap of high-street chains and street markets for decades—still makes for a bad whiff which can’t be shaken off.Watanabe’s Jamiroquai tropes were also reflected in the top-big, bottom-skinny silhouette of the lairy ’90s lad-turned-dad generation.
That consisted in oversized parkas and utility jackets worn with skinny jeans (not seen in ages); a new iteration of Watanabe’s wildly popular signature denims, patchworked with menswear tweeds and shirting bits and pieces. The London milliner Benny Andallo did the honors in replicating and riffing on Jay Kay’s outsize rep as ‘the cat in the hat’—and the three dancers did an almost exact “Virtual Insanity” re-enactment, on a white-tiled set recapturing the original look of Jonathan Glazer’s video. Will this season be enough to win over a younger generation or— maybe more to the point—will forty and fifty-something dads decide it’s still cool to relive their youths this way?
19 January 2022
From Tokyo, Junya Watanabe treated the internet to gilded draping, filmy fabrics, disrupted tailoring—and to printed collaborations with Japanese, Chinese, Nepalese, and Thai contemporary artists in Asia and around the world. He called it “Eastern Reminiscence,” his term for his reminiscences of pre-pandemic travel. Looking through a collection of photojournalism that Jamie Hawkesworth, the British photographer captured in 2019 in Bhutan, India, and Kashmir, Watanabe “became nostalgic for Asia” and “the pure heart of people” he saw there.One of the positive effects of working from home has been the enhanced appreciation of everything and everybody nearest to us. Watanabe’s collection seemed to spring from his emotional response to that. While completely true to the inimitable modernist-street-romantic style that the West has embraced for so long, this was a subtle refocusing of Watanabe’s perspective on the consciousness of cross-cultural arts and traditions that belong to Asia in camaraderie with like-minded people who work in the same way.It was all there to read in the intersections of his gently-elegant folds, layers of glimmering asymmetric drapery, brocades and the fragments of biker jackets, kilts, and men’s tailored jackets. First up: a white dress printed with a skull artwork—part punk, part Chinese porcelain—by the Chinese artist Jacky Tsai, based in London. Watanabe had Japanese heroes working with him too: black-on-flesh-colored patterns in semi-translucent dresses almost as fine as second-skins were by the tattoo artist Nissaco, renowned for his geometric work. A dress with a psychedelic artwork of goldfish and stylized women’s heads came from a 1975 animation by Keiichi Tanaami, the legendary pop artist who has been working his hallucinatory visions since the ’60s.Powerful hand-drawn black calligraphy by Wang Dongling, director of the Modern Calligraphy Study Center at the China National Academy of Arts, scrolled a Tang Dynasty poem over white dresses. Ang Tsherin Sherpa, a Tibetan artist based in California, creator of modern artworks based on traditional Tibetan thangka iconography, collaborated in orange-blue-green grid patterns sliding sideways over a draped dress. A vivid orange smock emblazoned with flowers and a painted dragon is a Thai fantasia dreamed up for Watanabe by the Bangkok-based illustrator Phannapast Taychamaythakool.
It’s obvious how much mutual respect Watanabe enjoys with his creative peers who are all exploring traditions and crafts in free-wheeling, sometimes surreal parallel. In the end, did his whole fantastically textured metallic series of evening pieces relate to Jamie Hawkesworth’s photographs of golden female temple deities? Not literally. Maybe not at all. But, even with the limitations of digital imagery to go on, it all looked like Junya Watanabe’s most inspired collection for a long time.
6 October 2021
Clicking through Junya Watanabe’s new spring collection, a theme emerges. Nearly every model wears a straw hat, sunglasses, and a pair of sandals. Without knowing much about his starting point, it looks as though he’s got a serious case of lockdown fever. Can you blame him? Spring is Watanabe’s third season showing his men’s collection on his home turf of Tokyo rather than in Paris, as he’s done for many years. Even the most peripatetic among us have been stopped in our tracks by the pandemic.Working with a long list of collaborators, from The North Face and ArkAir (for jackets) to Levi’s and Dickies (playing against type with sarouel pants) Watanabe put together a lineup that telegraphs a freelance kind of cool. Is the Junya guy working? Is he playing? A little bit of both? With fashion having more or less decided that it’s done with the suit, what men should wear below the belt was a big topic at the spring shows. That Watanabe’s culottes, kilts, and sarouel pants feel more grounded than some others’ experiments is not unexpected; with his men’s collections he doesn’t buy into a runway/real life divide.The souvenir T-shirts are the results of yet more collaborations with artists; he gave them a remit to “reflect on what one may encounter on travels East.” As it turns out, Watanabe took his inspiration for spring from a series of Jamie Hawkesworth photographs of Bhutan. The press notes quote the lensman: “It’s such an incredible feeling turning up to a place with no ideas or expectations, and just walking and exploring and taking photographs—it’s incredible what you find.” Whether Watanabe’s many followers are moving about more freely in 2022, or merely traveling in their minds, they’ll get a lot of mileage out of these easy-wearing, but still collectible clothes.
12 July 2021
Good to see women kicking up plenty of noise in Tokyo—at least among the hard-core rock-sister gang that Junya Watanabe brought onstage for his “Immortal Rock Spirit” fall show. Watanabe’s menswear methodology—within which he stands as fashion’s biggest superfan and rejiggerer of 20th-century authentic clothing genres—has spilled over into his womenswear this season. The upshot: an unruly collage of classic band T-shirts and logos, collabs with Versace and Levi’s, Fair Isle sweaters, tweed coats, and MA-1 jackets, usefully built to wear on the street. Utility, with a defiant streak.It felt like a good, long stride away from the corseted tutu and bondage collection he was showing this time last year on a runway in Paris (even though that one had been inspired by Debbie Harry). This time, Watanabe’s band tributes—to Kiss, Aerosmith, AC/DC, the Rolling Stones, Queen, the Who, et al—were wrapped up, patchworked, and hybridized into draped shapes which resisted standard fashion vocabulary. Were they togas, cocoons, tunics, dresses? These garments had some of all that going on, while also cleverly—and without constriction—capturing the flung-on blanket-y feeling that’s becoming emblematic of fall 2021.Watanabe is quite brilliant at striking a balance between quotidian pragmatism and the joy of wearing fashion. On the one hand, he broke down Levi’s (specific vintage models from 1937, 1947, 1966, and 1976), inserting plissé fabrics into their seams, at times making them look like skirts from the front, jeans in back. And on the other, there was the collab with Versace’s classic baroque scarves, seasonal souvenirs that are going to be sold jointly by both brands. Plenty of cozily cool knitwear and great outerwear is coming women’s way too. It’s utility with a colorfully defiant streak. Whatever the mood is destined to be on the streets this fall, the Watanabe woman will be up for stomping right through it.
20 March 2021
Since he designed this collection, and we’re reviewing it, in the middle of the deepest, bleakest winter for years, perhaps it’s no wonder that Watanabe felt like gathering up a bunch of comforting knitwear and turning it into his seasonal essay. “Tradition Made New” was the collection title he issued. Nordic sweaters, Aran-style cables, and Fair Isle patterns were transplanted or somehow woven or fused into every piece of outerwear throughout—except when entire sweaters turned up under plain coats and jackets.Under stripped-back COVID-secure circumstances, Watanabe’s show took place on a casting of regular models who walked along an anonymous back corridor of the designer’s work building. Absent the “real man” character-casting that has won Watanabe so much affection over the past couple of years, the focus was solely directed towards the clothes. What it lost in communicating the warm, fuzzy bro-to-bro feels of his Paris runways, it made up for in the surface complexities of successions of sweater-archetypes melding with quilted coat liners, army jackets, duffle coats, and baseball jackets. Along the way, his long-standing collaborations with Carhartt and Levi’s were also present.Watanabe has collaged together disparate clothing components for men so often that it’s become part of the brand language, but never quite as much as this seemed. His game in menswear—making fashion jigsaws out of authentic brand materials and garment archetypes—is also typically sensitive to the zeitgeist. There have been many collections in which he’s offered a cooler version of city tailoring for an office worker; this time, it looked more like a practical wardrobe for all the errand-running and walk-taking routines of the new working-from-home reality. Well—even though the models didn’t look like it this season—it’s the same men Watanabe’s addressing. Even if there are no meetings, pitches, and conferences, no dinners or parties or planes to catch, there’s still a need for something just a bit less ordinary for what the new “going out” means—even if it’s a stroll to the corner shop or a couple of laps around the park.
29 January 2021
More so than an ordinary season, the spring 2021 collections have been colored by nostalgia. With circumstances reduced by the pandemic—travel curtailed, resources and workforces limited—fashion’s creatives have turned inward. Discussing his latest outing, Junya Watanabe’s press notes said, “It is a collection that reproduces the costumes worn by the stars in my memories. My memories are monochrome, and I created a photo session with four fictional stars.” He even named them: The Spangles.The black and white images feature an assortment of apparently black or white looks, plus one or two more in silver. Nearly all of them are a-sparkle with sequins—not just the bubble-hemmed dresses that get the party started and the 1960s A-line gowns that close the look book, but also the trenchcoats that are integral to Watanabe’s oeuvre and the biker shorts that are a stylish nod to a silhouette that’s trending on the street.Last season Watanabe paid punkish tribute to Debbie Harry. Though the Spangles may owe a debt to the Supremes—there’s no soundtrack to the video the brand provided, so it’s hard to say—these muses are more abstract. In its spotlighting of sequins, the collection feels of a piece with earlier Watanabe shows that had singular focal points of their own, like army fatigues and puffers (that this designer has not had a Moncler Genius collaboration feels like a missed opportunity).His new clothes have an easy-to-wear aspect that many have keyed into in this COVID year. I’s a whole lot of caftan-like shapes and leggings, essentially and a stripped-down outing by house standards. The most complex shapes were the coats whose hems looped up, creating generous volumes. But in tricking everything out in spangles Watanabe turned the concept of #WFH-wear on its head. Comfort, he gets. Hibernation? Not so much. Sequins are associated with happier times. If and when the world opens up, Watanabe’s women will be ready.
19 October 2020
See these dudes? Get ready for who they are: Yusuke Seguchi, a master sushi chef; Taro Osamu, samurai swordsmith; Yutaro Sugitsara, professional fly-fisherman; Takaya Maki and Akira Nakamura, automobile mechanics; Masashi Hirao, bonsai master. We haven’t yet gotten to the bottom of the list of the guys—the honored experts in their fields, all over Japan—whom Junya Watanabe approached to be photographed wearing his spring 2021 men’s collection. But you get the gist. In the necessary shift away from the Paris runway format, Watanabe turned to the heroes of highly specialist traditional and technical professions he reveres. “This collection is designed for people who pursue their work with a sincere attitude all over Japan, and all over the world,” came the explanation. “People who demonstrate a certain authenticity and humility.”Hardworking clothes for hardworking men—it’s more than a fancy fashion trope in Watanabe’s world. In an important sense, the context of the real-guy look book returns his aesthetic to its rightful roots. For years, his own work has been carving out that ideal masculine space in which the distance between fashion and authentic utilitarian workwear is absolved. Still, while the baseline items—chore jackets, workwear denims, Carhartt khakis, carpenter coats—are durable and fit for purpose, there’s an undeniable romanticism about them. In the middle of a pandemic, with so many people stuck working on screens at home, the valorization of manual skills, of men who get under cars, forge swords, and fish rivers seems all the more vividly poignant.In his own time of confinement, Watanbe also found room to praise the cool men who uphold social life in Japan, saluting the Kobe bar owner Agobe Osamwentin and the Harajuku DJ-producer Bryan Burton-Lewis. A subtext threaded through these portraits of modern manhood was a list of books Watanabe has on his shelves. You don’t see that overtly stated in this collection, but the print and pattern he used refers to the graphic artists (and other design creatives) whose work forms his pantheon of idols. Coded and loaded with solidarity for what matters, he called this collection a “Manual.”
31 July 2020
Debbie Harry’s memoir,Face It, was published late last year, just about the time that Junya Watanabe would have been beginning to work on his new collection. But if we’ve been seeing more of her lately (she performed at a Coach show in New York earlier this month), Harry has always lived in Watanabe’s mind’s eye. “She was the one, when he was a young man,” a P.R. rep said after the show.That the Blondie frontwoman and punk pinup has special meaning for Watanabe was clear from the runway. Models wore rooty platinum wigs and microphone-smudged red lipstick, and Harry’s thrift shop prom dresses were spliced and diced into tulle petticoats layered under leather skirts. Then there was “Heart of Glass” and “Call Me” on the soundtrack.Sexy by Junya Watanabe was the collection’s official theme, an email explained. That’s a concept that also happens to be trending lately, but Watanabe’s sexy is not the slinky or skin-baring kind. His bustier dresses were cut from impenetrable luggage leather and in at least one instance layered over a blazer. Bondage straps outlined and shaped the bust above double-breasted coats and single-breasted jackets, but just as often those straps acted as accessory harnesses, with quilted bags and fanny packs and hip-slung panniers hooked onto them.Otherwise, we were treated to the kinds of deconstructions that qualify as Watanabe classics now: jackets scissored down the back and makeshift-ed back together with different ones, or simply worn as half-jackets held in place with a shoulder strap or belt. All this was marched out on winklepicker booties made in collaboration with Tricker’s, the English footwear company.This was Watanabe’s love letter to Harry, but the resulting message wasn’t so much “call me” as “watch out” or, maybe, “thank you, but I’m self-partnered.” That seems like the right adjustment for our times and for the designer’s fans.
29 February 2020
Junya Watanabe, typically, had one word—the perfect word—to sum up his show in praise of Italian dudes:classico! A society of immaculately grizzled dressers had nonchalantly strolled his runway, trilbies and flat caps set just so, as if on their way—no rush—to some sort of meetup. Some of them nodded to each other, shook hands, back slapped. Camel coats shrugged on, tweeds implanted with racing car jackets, gold chains flashing at their necks, the odd paisley scarf tucked into an unbuttoned shirt here, a pair of white-framed aviators there...before you knew it, Watanabe had us making up whole scenarios about these eye-catching guys, and whatever mysterious, lucrative businesses they might be involved in.Anyone who spends time in Italy—as Junya Watanabe does—recognizes these sorts of guys. They’re a familiar sight in any town, possessed of an enviable style that speaks to the background of Italian industry; in this case, it’s super high-grade car manufacturing, and the multiplicity of specialist engineering companies that supply it. Watanabe gave more information this time; he said the collection was inspired by the head of the textiles company with whom he works in Italy. An assistant pulled up a group photo of a trip to its HQ on her phone. “There, there he is,” she said, pointing to an idol of sophistication with a swept-back gray mane, sporting a three-piece suit with that casual raffishness only age can bring. “And he drives a Lexus sports car,” she added, translating Watanabe’s words, “open-top.”That’s what set him off on the Italian racing car track, and wanting to collaborate with an exhaustive list of brands in that world for use of their logos. There they all were, with their retro-revered typefaces patch-worked into fragments of padded souvenir jackets on tailoring: Pirelli, the tire people; Brembo, the brake manufacturers; Abarth, the sports car makers. And so on.The notion of being in a club, in the know, sporting the signs and symbols of authentic provenance–Junya Watanabe’s work is all about the language of masculine identity. Each season he basically writes an ever-expanding encyclopedia on the subject, an index of ongoing collaborators. Practical, affectionate, good-natured, real—the Watanabe vibe for men makes his show one of the most uplifting in Paris.
17 January 2020
“You might as well ask me why I’m living,” Junya Watanabe replied to a journalist who’d tried to find out what motivated his Spring collection. He was smiling. “No theme,” was the non-information which had been emailed to journalists. “Watanabe-San simply wanted to create strong garments by maximizing his techniques to the fullest.”Anyway, it was fully self-evident that Watanabe had been having fun as a designer, playing around with dozens of ways to slice and dice a trench coat. The first was a more or less regular double-breasted classic, with wide, extended sleeves. Then he got going with 3-D collaging, scissoring the makings of a raincoat into a full-skirted maxi dress, a pinafore, nipped-waist tailored jackets, a kilt, a pencil skirt, a miniskirt suit, a cape, trousers, parka variants, and a ball gown.Midway, he removed the front sections of coats, and some men’s tailored jackets, and began fusing them onto shirts and white T-shirts.Was it a bravura demonstration of Watanabe as a master of conceptual deconstruction? Well, yes—he is that—but also, no. The attraction of Junya Watanabe for his fans is his essential groundedness in making clothes for the street. He put everything with leggings or fluoro stretch pieces. The prints were collaborations commissioned from artists Demsky J. and Bicicleta Sem Freio. They’re modern muralists whose work is made to be experienced and enjoyed in public—just like Watanabe’s designs.
28 September 2019
Junya Watanabe’s menswear doesn’t just use patchwork as a look; the whole collection is itself always a composite of brands, chosen for their authenticity—Carhartt, Gieves & Hawkes, Levi’s, New Balance, et al—essentially brought together to create a jigsaw of what it is to live as a civilized man. It was even clearer to see into the mind of this hunter-gatherer of the good life today. There he was: a believable walking psychological profile of a creditable middle-aged male, casually exhibiting his advanced tastes for craftsmanship and higher intellectual pursuits in his wardrobe of excellently chosen workwear.The pointers to how this paragon of environmentally aware dandy constructs his lifestyle were all there in the array of logos printed on the sustainable cloth bags which were being carried throughout the show. He’s a drinker of craft beer (Dobri Grasshopper) and hard-to-find wines from small vineyards (Noble Fine Liquor); he eats at the specialist farm-meat-to-table restaurant (St. John in London); he is a purchaser of traceable fish (Fiskerikajen fish market in Copenhagen); and so on. And his intellectual diet consists of a varied selection of indie titles, such asCivilizationnewspaper from New York, andReal Review, a London cultural quarterly “dedicated to what it means to live today.” Yes, we know these guys exist, in cities all over the world. So do their female counterparts, who would love to wear exactly the kind of clothes Watanabe shows for men. He’s missing a trick here: There’s definitely a demand for non-messed-about clothing of this ilk for women. He should open it up to female peers next time.
21 June 2019
Junya Watanabe’s Silver Swagger menswear show was a superlative celebration of middle-aged and senior manhood; an inspirational beacon of cool realness—whoever said that to be good-looking you have to be young? Watanabe got hopes up, as Steff Yotka put it herVoguethink piece, around the need for MILF representation on runways. Yet disappointingly, he proved not to be the man to follow through with projecting age parity on the women’s side of his business. Rather, the absolute opposite: Watanabe called his collection Kawaii, after the Japanese cult of sugar-sweet cartoon girly-ness.Granted, the pairs of young models who proceeded out in wigs tied up in infantile bunches didn’t look all that cutesy on second glance. Their fake eyelashes were askew, their pink lipstick was laid on too thickly, like dolls that had been played with by a child. Once you started noticing that, you also noticed the puzzling fact that there wasn’t an Asian face included in the casting. That’s odd, when you think about it, from a designer who works in a company owned by arguably the greatest Japanese leader in global fashion, the legendary 76-year old female designer Rei Kawakubo. (There weren’t any Asian men in the January show either.)But to the clothes: Maybe there were intended ironies coded into the chopped-up flower prints, which were reassembled as grunge patchworks and worn over jeans with either spiked biker boots or (the best thing) fancy silver leather–trimmed suede Western boots. The collection continued in the collaged style of joining one part of a familiar utilitarian garment with another. By now, this is a familiar Watanabe practice (in his menswear collections he does it with lists of collaborating brands); one he’s developed in step with what Chitose Abe (another ex-Comme des Garçons designer) has made so successful in her Sacai women’s collection.This is not intended to roast the content of Watanabe’s women’s collection—it was full of comfortable and utilitarian clothes that possess the rare, inherent quality of having nothing difficult about them. The irony is that Watanabe designs collections that are identified with and worn by women of all ages and sizes from multiple backgrounds, around the world. Would that he took the next step and welcomed their representatives onto his runway, as he did with his male audience. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, as the British saying goes.
2 March 2019
It’s absurd how much time men’s fashion spends not looking at middle-aged manhood. At 58, Junya Watanabe is a dissenter—positively enthusiastic about the prospect of recruiting the ranks of senior dudes he got to mosey out on his runway today. “Silver swagger” was his pithy descriptor of the collection’s vibe, and man, did they deliver it. Rarely has there been such a viewing of old-guy style authority—beards, cheekbones, swept-back gray locks, and I-get-up-like-this-son clothes ownership—witnessed under the fashion sun.If you can classify it as “fashion,” that is. The genius of the design Watanabe commands in his practice for men is that it gets over the embarrassment of novelty fashion—which is never quite on for the adult male. His proposition is more of an assemblage of garments that have been okayed by the general council of lived-in male experience. He’s the jazz rearranger of the back catalog of all the stuff blokes want in their lives: army surplus, tweed, denim, biker leather, parkas, ’50s knits, corduroy, workwear, regular shirts.And of course, every piece of clothing—jacket, coat, shirt, whatever—gets to be a lived-in collage of the materials above. He followed up with a further statement in an email, which confirmed: “Watanabe-san finds that today, older men possess stronger personalities and are cooler than the younger generations.” Guys past 40, step this way.
18 January 2019
Junya Watanabe is always at his brilliant, refreshing best when he’s in a romantic mood—or when he trains his brain on investigating some sort of generic piece of clothing. A happy morning for fashion, then, when his two strengths came together in a collection about denim intersecting with the processes of dressmaking. Or, as his team translated afterward, “A romantic feeling in rock music.” Ah, yes: Another thing about Watanabe is that he’s a music buff.Maybe he was listening to Queen or Strike Back (a French neo-rock band, he said—there were a couple of tour tees in the show) as he got on with chopping up acres of different kinds of denim as he riffed away on crinolines, bias-cut dresses, and lingerie. Anyway, he was clearly in a good mood when he was at it, happily experimenting in his own productive groove, sans angst or any overtly intellectual messaging.Funny, though: In dissecting the templates of Old World haute couture and patch-working them into the eternal signifier of youth and streetwear, Watanabe’s work chimes with themes that have been threading through the Spring shows in general. As Freddie Mercury’s voice sang his ’70s Queen hits loudly and clearly on the soundtrack, it was mood-uplifting to watch Watanabe play with the processes of patternmaking and work in progress. Watanabe has a lifetime of cutting skills in his back pocket. He has often synthesized his admiration for Dior’s New Look and Madeleine Vionnet’s bias cut into his shapes, punk-ing them up as he goes. This time, he treated ’50s circle skirts, tulle petticoats, and ball gowns to half-and-half effects. What looked frontally like dance skirts turned out to be attached to regular jeans at the back. Other times, the dresses or lingerie slips were vertically split and sewn onto denim overalls and white T-shirts. At other times, he just allowed himself to patchwork his much-loved fishtail bias-cut dresses in denim.This much we know about Watanabe: Whatever he shows on the runway will always be backed up by further highly wearable variations on the theme once the clothes arrive in store. A classic Watanabe season to relish is clearly coming up. The resonances with others, though? The mood for reevaluating couture processes and fantasies of lost elegance has, so far, been documented at Maison Margiela (check out its latest menswear, particularly), in Francesco Rizzo’s Marni collection, and from the London designers Matty Bovan and Richard Quinn.
Watanabe joins that merry band of reconstructionists. There may be more on the way.
29 September 2018
The theme from the ’60s sci-fi puppet showThunderbirdsmade everyone sit up and smile as Junya Watanabe’s models emerged onto the runway from a M*A*S*H-type army tent pitched in the super-minimal conservatory of the Parc Citroën. Watanabe’s sense of humor and hidden commentaries on the state of the world are aspects of his character that are irresistible to project onto him—he doesn’t go in for explanations—but this time his backstage word was that he’d been thinking about “the innocent childhood sensibility of obsessing over heroes and hobbies.” Boys playing at soldiers, then. It was an ingenious way of falling in with today’s march of military and utility staples, which are universal constants all over menswear.As fashion’s collaborator-in-chief, Watanabe is better than anyone at patrolling the frontier between the authentic and designer fashion. This season, he’d joined up with Ark Air, producers of high-performance fabric and garments that see action with such outfits as the British Royal Marines and special forces, and the French Foreign Legion. Hence the real-deal camouflage deployed in trousers, shorts, and jackets, and embedded in lots of hybrid patchworks throughout. (Apologies for the puns; the ease with which military metaphors march in lockstep with men’s fashion is telling in itself.)The references to army and navy surplus kept swinging out to the bracing accompaniment of army band music—at one point, the “Colonel Bogey March.” It provided a full parade of super-wearable uniform items that have been co-opted into the language of menswear, with a genius focus on the current fashion obsession with all manner of strap-on pocketed kit. Flak vests, harnesses with multiple pouches, holster bags, fanny packs, and backpacks worn across the chest for personal security: All these were present and correct, just as so many had been in Virgil Abloh’s debut at Vuitton yesterday.A perfectly on-point real-wear collection for the man who wants to be in-the-know fashionable but also camouflage himself as a civilian? That’s Watanabe’s unique attraction in a nutshell.There’s something else that shouldn’t go unrecorded in this dispatch, though. You want to think about the fact that these boys were all of an age to join up, as opposed to Watanabe’s sometime choice of Dad-gen men. Watanabe is a pacifist who has shown as much in many of his tender, moving collections for women.
In a fraught age when so many designers are talking about peace, love, and understanding, was there a comment here on the incorrigible masculine urge to fight—and the early-years of gendered play-conditioning that encourages it? Maybe, maybe not. Then again, Watanabe did break in with a rare interjection in the backstage debrief. “International Rescue,” he said. On the side of the good guys, then.
22 June 2018
Junya Watanabe let it be known he had No Theme this season. Was this, then, a straightforward case of an it-is-what-it-is collection? Just a candid lineup of oversize jackets and coats, and leggings worn with super-chunky ’90s-throwback Buffalo shoes? But no, that wasn’t what it was, at least in quite a few cases. There was a trick: Several of these outfits came joined together, so that—for example—a tailored jacket and pleated skirt became one garment, or a slip dress, layered over a Norwegian sweater, was fused with a different gray sweaterdress in back.Junya Watanabe’s approach to fashion is—refreshingly—to make it look decidedly un-fashion. He has been working on making his men’s collection look as generic as possible for a long time, collaborating with an encyclopedic array of brands—North Face, Carhartt, Levi’s, and more—to import the masculine aura of authentic workwear to a fashion context. This collection was maybe his parallel coolness solution for women: looking at the kind of clothes kids once hoped to find in vintage markets and replicating them with added design bonuses.That would make sense of his playing around with bad ’80s chintz, oversize pilled Scandinavian sweaters, raincoats, grandma floral dresses, and grandpa suits. He spun many options out of the skinny-legging-big-top proportions he pursued single-mindedly throughout. We appreciate his message.
3 March 2018
If Junya Watanbe’s guys had walked off the runway and hung around on the street, passersby might easily have taken them for clusters of off-duty police officers, security guards, utility workers, builders, or students. Set against today’s weird fashion landscape—the appropriation of existing forms, the rampant logomania—Watanabe’s work stands out as the most authentic of the lot. At a juncture when the imitation of workwear, outdoorwear, and technical sportswear has turned into commonplace style, Watanabe’s approach is of a whole different order from the posturing of the in-joke trope. Like a mechanic, he’s interested in bolting utilitarian clothes together to improve performance value.A prime demonstration of that came halfway through the show. The audience had had a chance to tick off some of the brand collaborations Watanabe has going on—Canada Goose, North Face, Karrimor, Carhartt, New Balance, Levi’s. It had clocked Watanabe’s application of reflective strips and considered the urban usefulness of that idea for commuters, pedestrians, and cyclists on dark winter nights. It had noticed that some of the men had nylon totes or were carrying backpacks. And then one model stood at the end of the runway, popped one of the nylon totes inside out, and—hey, presto!—it transformed into a checked, tailored jacket.It transpired that there are various permutations of that handy bag-jacket device, one of which is a backpack. Watanabe’s catering to the male mind in the context of modern lifestyle is a unique phenomenon in men’s fashion. When two or three brands are gathered together in a Watanabe garment (as they so often are), the upshot is always functionality, not surface fakery for the sake of fashion. A Junya Watanabe piece comes with built-in authenticity, durability, and warmth. It’s the real deal, with an extra by-product: guaranteed 100 percent cool.
19 January 2018
“We started off wanting to do something natural, like she shapes of stones,” said Junya Watanabe’s interpreter, “and we collaborated with Marimekko.” The urge to retreat to domesticity and to the calm contemplation of nature are themes playing throughout the collections for reasons too painfully obvious to rehearse. Junya Watanabe, over in Tokyo (where Kim Jong-un has been firing warheads over the north of the country), comes from a place where block-out-the-world feelings must have a sharp reality. Maybe that’s why his collection looked back to a time and a place—Finland in the ’50s and ’60s—when humanity was capable of creating a bright and happy design for living.Seven of the big, bold, black-and-white graphics from the Marimekko interiors fabric archive were turned to Watanabe’s purposes, as he sent out his wrapped, circular-cut, sometimes 3-D toga-cum-cocoon form pieces. The Marimekko penny really dropped with the audience when the cheerful Scandinavian classic pattern of vegetables and flowers began to come out. No matter that one of them was in the form of a tunic worn by a punky girl in thigh-high black leather boots, a spiked collar, and cuffs—that was unmistakably the stuff of tea towels, trays, and kitchen curtains she was wearing.Even when he seemed to veer away from the Marimekko scheme of things, coming up with sailor-stripe jersey T-shirt dresses, it turns out (should you wish to Google) he was nodding to the fact that the designer Annika Rimala had first used cotton jersey stripes at the Helsinki HQ in 1968. That leads to another thought about Watanabe and how he works. At a time when appropriating the already existing is a much talked-about practice in fashion (just look at the methods of Alessandro Michele at Gucci, John Galliano at Maison Margiela, and Demna Gvasalia at Vetements), Watanabe has the longest record of all as a designer-collaborator. The difference with him is that the relationships with external companies he admires and respects for their aesthetics and specific expertise are authentic ones, not just “inspired by” looks. Further footnotes on the show revealed the fact that the biker jackets, a Watanabe classic, are in fact produced in partnership with Schott.For all this, it was pretty un-theme-y, this show. Despite his insistence on punk hairdos and accessories, there’s a romantic side to Watanabe.
His long, full skirts—one black and Victoriana-like and the other with a stiffer ’50s-ball-gown vibe—threw minds optimistically forward into how nice it would be to swirl around in them next summer. Assuming nuclear annihilation doesn’t get in the way.
30 September 2017
The cooling of the “ordinary” has been one of the threads running through the menswear collections. Whether it’s labeled normcore or dadcore or just back-to-basics, perhaps the underlying cause is fashion’s uneasy feeling that it ought to make itself seem less like a frivolous inessential when times are tough. Well, if the call is for durable functional garments that somehow sidestep fashion, thenJunya Watanabeis the designer with the ultimate authority in the field. He’s been building respectful two-way relationships with admired “authentic” menswear manufacturers since long before the termcollaborationbecame commonplace. His Spring collection was a masterful contribution to the “real” conversation, or “the legit way to wear workwear,” as he put it, in a show note.There were 48 jackets, trousers, coats, and T-shirts made in collaboration with Carhartt, some jeans produced with Levi’s, and anoraks brilliantly patchworked together from cut-up backpacks and hiking jackets by The North Face and Karrimor. Watanabe has an ineffably subtle hand when jigsawing things together. Even when a pair of jeans might have zones of ticking stripes, leather, and corduroy, they still manage to come out looking pressed and sensible rather than an overcomplicated, try-hard fashion item.A lot of this was down to Watanabe’s casting. The men who carried off this collection were individuals who looked as if they were part of the real world. Watching them walk out, in their different ages, ethnicities, builds, and beards, was a shockingly unusual sensation. In some ways, it felt not unlike the emotional impact of Dries Van Noten’s gathering of his former models at his last womenswear show. In this case, though, it wasn’t just the rarity of seeing more mature people represented on the runway that was stirring. It was the dependable, skilled, down-to-earth look of the adults Watanabe was depicting. Somehow, they looked like the sort of men who can be trusted to calmly fix things in the world, a completely different language of clothing and values from that of the besuited corporate titans, bankers, and politicians who messed it all up in the first place.
23 June 2017
Junya Watanabe has always had youth culture in his blood. It’s essential to his brand. In an unusually self-revelatory mood this season, he ensured that an email reached his reviewers, explaining that his first collection was made from ripped-up sofa fabric, old curtains, and men’s tweed coats he’d found at flea markets in London. At a wild guess, that formative trip must have been at a time when punks still paraded tartan, cheap leopard spots, and ripped fishnets in the King’s Road around Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s shop, Sex. Punk broke out in the mid-1970s and continued amongst the hardcore few into the early 1980s, which would have made Watanabe somewhere in his late teens to early twenties at the time (he was born in 1961 and was possibly still a student at Bunka Fashion College).Anyway, punk is a classic style now, and Watanabe is an Anglophile. He chose to revisit his nostalgia for it and reuse some of the fabrics he started with. The music, though, was from the earlier doyennes of glam rock, with Marc Bolan of T.Rex singing, “But you won’t fool the children of the revolution,” as girls with crazy-colored, partly-shaved hair stomped by looking like not-quite-right fusions of Ziggy Stardust and Soo Catwoman. Was it imagination, or did some of Watanabe’s pleather circular-cutout jackets look like smashed vinyl records?The collection was a “medley,” as he put it: the punkish staples on one side and his geometric three-cutting obsession on the other. Midway (and it was a long show), there was a superb moment when he began pleating and draping the tartan into short, toga-like shapes. Following that came the furnishing fabric. Heavy-duty curtain brocade was worked into the body of a biker jacket and worn over a gold Lurex sweater and swingy Stewart tartan skirt. A beige trench coat had sleeves covered in chintzy fabric patchwork. All of the above were the epitome of the kind of things Junya Watanabe fans crave to find in stores, whatever the season.
4 March 2017
The photographs of Junya Watanabe’s men’s show don’t show off the clothes as well as they might, but bear with it—these are clothes with a high probability of getting into the wardrobes of cool guys everywhere. The first man out was lugging a giant army green duffel bag and wearing a checked jacket with a fragmentary yellow nylon yoke prominently bearing the wordsThe North Face. The ubiquitously, internationally popular American utility brand was only at the top of the list of collaborators Watanabe worked with this season—there were Levi's, Carhartt, Vans, Barbour, Kangol, and Gloverall, too.The quest for authenticity and the honoring of genuine, traditional forms of manufacturing has emerged as a strong thread through this season’s menswear shows. There's something in the male mentality which loves engaging with the knowledge of exactly how products are engineered—and a down-to-earth respect for things which are not too messed-about by fashion. Vetements might have made the whole of its last collection as collabs, Dries Van Noten may have decided to label parts of his Fall collection with the provenance of its manufacturers, but it’s been a regular part of Junya Watanabe’s modus operandi for menswear for years.His whole thing this season was essentially a giant collage of collaborations absolutely certain to drive collectors crazy. The Levi’s, for one, with their perfect wide-leg slouch and their furry animal-print patch pockets. The waxed Barbour country jacket with leather motorcycle patches, for two. The North Face coat which had been re-created from a dismantled bag might top them all, though. The tote’s handles, placed on the inside-back, had been repurposed as straps, so that the coat could be slung off a shoulder when not in use, and its zippered pockets aligned to be useful for carrying laptops or whatever else.This genius for remastering and repurposing existing products is especially cool because it never shouts too loudly about itself or falls into the trap of being too “fashion.’ It’s a compliment to Watanabe to say that the guys in these pictures look pretty much like men on the street, going about their ordinary business.
20 January 2017
Junya Watanabehas always been fluent in the language of street style: His consistently brilliant chopped-up and redone jeans, motorcycle jackets, and army surplus are avidly-amassed wardrobe trophies for his followers. Strangely, though, so little is known about this very private Japanese designer that it's easy to project onto him the persona of a recluse who works in isolation in Tokyo, while perhaps enjoying solving geometry equations on the side. With his spring collection, it became apparent that the hermit-like suppositions might not be true—because Watanabe hung out in Berlin before coming up with the powerful meld of street-tribe clothes and spiky 3D geometry he put out today.Well, there's no better city to immerse yourself in every shade of underground and alternative culture: punk, goth, skater, biker, neo-hippy, whatever. Low-cost and liberal, Berlin is Europe's magnet for all of that. But the city’s streetwear sources alone weren’t enough for Watanabe. Neither, upon reflection, was the extended exercise in origami that he showed last season. Instead, Watanabe combined them all—or so an email from his publicist suggested: “Neither extreme construction nor streetwear stand alone stylistically. They are complementary and when merged together, become stronger.”So we got the two sides of Watanabe's interests, brought together in a show that was incredibly dense with product to buy: everything from German-slogan band T-shirts and patchwork skater pants to shredded jeans and micro-floral vintage look dresses, white lace skirts, soccer shirts, and even trenchcoats. Watanabe's 3D overlayers of crenellated, cyber-punkish black nylon made far more sense against all that—perhaps relating more to the virtual fantasies of gamers and cosplayers than to the realms of inertly conceptual experimental fashion. Bottom line: As curious as this may be to assert, Junya Watanabe is to Japanese design what Hedi Slimane was at Saint Laurent—though, of course, much more discreet.
1 October 2016
The ragtag bunch of models who make up the cast of each ofJunya Watanabe’s shows are so deliberate they don’t only support the clothing physically but ideologically as well. Take Spring 2017, where swaggering and heavily inked sorts meandered menacingly toward the audience, confronting each bench of onlookers with a sneer. The small-town big man was Watanabe’s jump-off point—gangsters, hustlers, general ne’er-do-wells. Boys from the wrong side of the tracks.Or at least, their impression and impressionists. Back to those models’ bodies: Watanabe deliberately chose a selection of tattooed types this season. Where there wasn’t a tattoo, a fake one was drawn on to ratchet up the perceived intimidation factor. That’s a cliché, but there is still something unsettling about a facial tattoo barely covering a scowling countenance—even if the allover arm decoration dubbed “sleeves” are fashionable and indeed appear on many a runway as par for the course of casting young, thin men in the 21st century. Everybody’s at it.Maybe that’s where the interest in sleeves came from, as Watanabe patched the padded and quilted arms of biker jackets onto jackets or coats tailored in tweed—the dirty-work-doing henchman fused with the besuited mob boss. Other sleeves were notably decorated, in florals, say, or paisley, or tattoo-style prints on plain wool, with tattooed bodied echoed—very obliquely—by tropical prints, black on beige. Watanabe doesn’t seem like the type to consort with criminals: He quoted from cinematic references and archetypes, particularly Emir Kusturica’s Eastern European farceBlack Cat, White Cat. The prints on clothes crossed between tattoos and movie posters: The wordptaki, Polish for “birds,” swarmed across a chest. Russian prisoners get tattoos of flocks of birds behind bars to symbolize a longing for freedom. They appeared at the end, Watanabe’s traditional finale of shirts, a vehicle to emphasize a single idea, frequently the most commercially savvy.Don’t read too much into the bad-boy posturing. Watanabe is clever. He rarely subjugates his menswear to the demands of an overwrought theme, rather hanging a wardrobe of disparate pieces from a few interconnected ideas that you can choose to buy into or willfully ignore. The clothing at Watanabe comprised multiple collaborations—Levi’s for wide-leg jeans and jackets; fine-gauge John Smedley knitwear; finely constructed Heinrich Dinkelacker shoes.
Plenty of Watanabe clients will fall onto (and into) those, as well as his cleverly tweaked tailoring and workwear-focused items, without even a whisper of their criminal past. How’s that for rehabilitation?
24 June 2016
The crazy math boffin inJunya Watanabe’s brain came out today, and dominated his show. Watanabe’s fascination with advanced math and geometry is no new thing. A glance at his history proves just how frequently he’s devoted himself to cutting, crimping, and stamping out fabric as if he’s applying mathematical formulas to clothing the female form—and no doubt, with the aid of laser-cutting technology and computer science, although he is never one to step forth and discuss his processes. Meanwhile, it’s not much of a shot in the dark to guess there’s a more historical cultural link with the Japanese art of origami in Watanbe’s interests.The surprise in his Fall collection was that he didn’t offer anything other than variations on the theme of 3-D cutting and origami-like structures, which were made in industrial neoprene. Usually with Watanabe, one waits for passages and sequences, where he develops themes in different ways, often very poetic and emotionally stirring ones which allude to the history of fashion or echo the noises of contemporary life. This time, it was more like a pure geometry class, and a slightly arid experience for those who would rather analyze his poetry.
5 March 2016
Junya Watanabe’s strength is in the relentless reiteration of a single notion or motif, stuttering through synonyms for a particular term in fashion’s vocabulary. It’s an idea he often turns to in his shows—taking an archetypal item or technique, and then exhausting it. Minimum input, maximum impact. So it was interesting when he said that his Fall 2016 collection was about what to wear outside. “This is not a deeper remark on the elements or state of dressing,” Watanabe stated.What it was, rather, was an exploration of men’s coating and tailoring, spinning the simple notion through a multiplicity of fabrications, interpretations, and conjugations. Suits were tightly packed against the body, cut slender and minimally detailed; there was a skinny mood of mod precision, underscored by the models’ graphic bowl cuts and often underpinned by skinny cropped-ankle trousers. (Granted, Watanabe did wide, too.) But the coat, here, was king. If you’re looking for a perfect update of any classic style you can tug from the dictionary of fashion, Watanabe’s your go-to.As these were clothes for the outside, Watanabe bonded and coated the fabrics to protect his wearers against the elements, retaining heat and resisting water. A bunch of the techniques came from the military, but it was the practical ethos rather than anything aggressive or armed that drew them to Watanabe’s attention. Likewise the inclusion of solar panels in many of the garments, plasticized strips whose purpose was betrayed only by snaking wires coiling into the garment they were attached to—clipped into the back of a tailored Crombie, beneath a storm flap, or patched into the chest of a reefer coat.You hope those styles can be commercialized, with circuitry included: It’s a smart, unobtrusive idea that, despite Watanabe’s assertion, feels like it connects to the way people want to live today. Namely, like super-speed snails—moving fast but carrying pretty much everything you need on your back. These were predominantly utilitarian garments, peppered with pockets ripe for stuffing with gratuitous gewgaws, in hardy, hard-wearing tweeds and wools; the solar panels added an extra level of use. They not only keep you warm, they’ll charge your phone. How clever.They were clever because they were, at base, basic. Everyone needs a coat—especially in the current bitter snap of cold engulfing the Northern Hemisphere. (Crude oil prices have risen 5 percent this week as a result of the heating demands.
) Watanabe often offers a compartmentalized wardrobe for his man this season: Alongside collaborations with Tricker’s (which makes his great brogues) and Levi’s (which makes his great jeans), he worked on a range of heavy, hardy shoes with Heinrich Dinkelacker. The coats, though, were all Watanabe’s own.Some designers take tackling those meat and potatoes of dressing as an excuse for slacking off, producing commercial but creatively anodyne basics. Not Watanabe. After all, isn’t steak and frites just meat and potatoes, except more expertly handled, served up better?
22 January 2016
Junya Watanabeset his show in the National Museum of Immigration History in Paris, an immense Art Deco place, built to celebrate the cultural benefits of French colonialism, when that sort of thing was thought to accrue to the glory of the republic. On the way in, guests passed a piece of contemporary art which gave some people pause: a wooden boat, filled to heaving point with bundles wrapped in African fabric. It took but a small leap to associate that with another scene atDismaland, where Banksy's boats filled with miniature models of immigrants floated on a disused Weston-super-Mare holiday pond.An uncomfortable choice of surroundings, then, for Watanabe to show us a collection themed around African fabric patterns, on a cast of white models whose faces were decorated with pale flesh–color globules, mimicking tribal scarification marks. It was hard to know which way to react. Watanabe is as known for his quiet pacifism and his silent rebellious streak as he is for never giving explanatory quotes. Was it a commentary on fashion's long record of annexing the dress, art, and religious artifacts of "other" peoples? Should he be criticized for doing that? And how does he view that from Tokyo, living in a country whose culture is constantly appropriated by Western fashion (as seen only this week inJohn Galliano's geisha-themed show)?Anyway: There was no denying the anxiety of watching Watanabe's show through the prism of all these contextual and moral questions. A pity, because at the beginning, there was a clear view to beautiful, loose smocks and shirtdresses, some with draped belled sleeves, and semi-sheer fabrics, some of which involved black matte lace constructed in a pattern which merged a sense of camouflage with animal pattern. After that came two looks with a knitted tiger amid leopard pelts thrown over the shoulders as wraps; also great. No doubt the African wax-print looks, which followed, will be prove as easy and commercial summerwear in stores; but at the same time, they will leave some feeling uneasy.
3 October 2015
Junya Watanabe's theme was "Faraway." Nowhere specific, but the collaborator on this collection was Vlisco, the Dutch company that has been the major supplier of fabric to West and Central Africa since the mid-19th century, so Watanabe's destination wasn't really so vague. And he clarified it further with the accessories—beads, bones, fetish objects—he collected from a couple of Parisian stores that specialize in African artifacts. Without knowing that Vlisco is considered instrumental in helping to shape the region's cultural identity (for example, British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare uses the company's fabrics in his work to challenge Western colonial history), it was not hard to see how Watanabe's presentation of pallid Europeans in patchworked Africana might spark some knee-jerk negativism. But these eyes, at least, were reminded of the designer's work withboro, the traditional Japanese patchwork that began centuries ago as peasant clothing. There is a belief in Japan that when something has been damaged and mended, it becomes more beautiful.And there was certainly beauty in Watanabe's collection. Everything was infected in some way with pattern and color, here as naive as a children's book illustration, there as geometric as an array of Cubist forms. Nothing was sacred, not a Breton stripe, not a double-breasted suit in a navy shadow plaid, not a Bermuda short, nor Watanabe's signature inside-out pieces. The patchwork gave each outfit a strong character; the tribal add-ons compounded it. With panama hats, bow ties, and sockless brogues, the models might have been Dutch businessmen adrift on the equator, their work long finished, their compass bearings lost, their own world slowly merging with the environment in which they found themselves. A man out of a Werner Herzog film, in fact. Where was Klaus Kinski when you needed him?Something else occurred while the parade of boned, beaded, bangled wannabe witchdoctors trailed past. With the patchwork and the extraordinary accessories, it was almost as though Watanabe was turning the models themselves into fetish objects, the focus of a new kind of cargo cult. And, with its irrational worship of the object, isn't that just what fashion is?
26 June 2015
There is often a "Rosebud" moment with Junya Watanabe's collections: aCitizen Kane-like word or phrase uttered by the designer that seems to convey many intricate and multifaceted thoughts, expressed ultimately in the simplest of ways. But this word—today it was "honeycomb"—is like the answer to a complex mathematical equation; it is how the answer itself is reached, the process to find the distillation that is important. What you see in each Watanabe collection is a kind of complex and obsessive problem-solving. And for this season, that notion of the mathematical problem is particularly apposite.For Fall, the designer wanted to explore the idea of "dimensionality through clothing." And it is that place where mathematics and nature meet—in a certain soft yet rigorous organic architecture—that was at the crux of today's show.Fractals, Fibonacci numbers, and the Golden Ratio all seemed to come into play with the purity of shapes and the geometry of this collection—and it was in the hexagonal form of the honeycomb that things really took flight. Hexagonal forms are found in nature due to their efficiency, and here the efficiency of structure and decoration became one, particularly as the clothes became great swathes of honeycombed capes.Complex pleating systems are a common thread linking many Watanabe collections, but not since Fall 2000 have they had such a startling starring role. The romance of that show gave way to a certain hardened graphic attitude in this one. Although classicism was still there, obsessiveness and transgression had taken over—the models frequently emerged with scribble on parts of their bodies, and on closer inspection, this was a mimicking of mathematical equations, transferred from whiteboard to skin.Like the mathematician John Nash, Watanabe seems almost obsessive about searching for hidden patterns. Each collection proposes the exhaustive solving of another problem, to the point that you almost wonder whether the designer might drive himself mad with such concentration on it. The thing is, it never gets tiresome. The obsessiveness begets the intrigue of much of this clothing and ultimately the satisfaction and strange desirability of it; neither does it mean there is no proclivity to prettiness. Today this collection exerted the same, strange pull to not only admire but to own.
7 March 2015
Junya Watanabe has always been fascinated by hermetic dress codes, but with his men's show today he outdid himself. Focusing on thesapeurs,the Congolese dandies for whom extreme style has become a way of flouting the status quo, Watanabe presented a supremely elegant collection of formal tailoring. You could go back before La Sape (La Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes) to Carl Van Vechten's photographs of Harlem in its Sunday best to find an equally illuminating reference point. Either way, the show was a theatrical parade of sharp-dressed men who put on a display—from Samuel L. Jackson's gimlet stare to Michael J. Jackson's limber bodypop—which reduced the audience to a state of helpless ovation.The presentation also highlighted Watanabe's ability to extract as much juice as possible from one very defined inspiration. If it began with a fairly literal statement of intent—a shawl-collar blazer over smart gray trousers—it extended into jackets that were knitted, not woven; pants that had given out completely on the thigh and knee; and items pieced together in Watanabe's signature patchwork. There was a puffa jacket, and jogging pants, and jean-jacket detailing to inject a sportswear element—everything put together with that peerless Japanese precision that makes the copy more authentic than the original.Speaking of which, there was also extreme contrast in the model situation, with the sapeurs sharing space with a handful of dandified Edwardian hoods who looked unsettlingly like undertakers. They helped ensure that the show was a bolder statement than we've seen from Watanabe of late. We've been hungering for it.
23 January 2015
Graphic girls as living dolls and clothes as performance as opposed to clothes for performance: This was what could be found in Junya Watanabe's latest collection for Spring. There were certainly no heavily researched breathable fibers, just lots of warm leatherette (especially appropriate in a Grace Jones à la Jean-Paul Goude way) alongside PVC, Perspex, and the occasional jolt of tulle…oh, and rubber swimming caps.Here, a yearning for the certainties/uncertainties of an early 20th-century avant-garde past seemed apparent—as it has for a fair few designers this season. In Watanabe's case, there seemed to be an echoing of Robert and Sonia Delaunay's Orphism—particularly Sonia's performance-based pieces and a synthesis of her and her circle's fashion work that emerged after the Great War—Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russe in its various influential forms, and Hugo Ball's Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire that began in 1916. In short, if you were looking to Watanabe for a nice pair of patchwork jeans for Spring, forget it.Instead, Watanabe's "patchwork madness" collection of last season—which had already begun the process of morphing into something much more abstract in many of its circular shapes, volumes, and constructions—was here turned into "graphic marching." Those are the latest defining words of the designer.In many ways, that idea of graphic marching ties in with the thought of the "machine-age" woman of the first half of the last century—and here she was almost like the literal incarnation of the poster girl, wearing flattened vinyl circular forms and experimental compositions, marching ever forward. But what can't be ignored in this collection, either, is the pop synthesis that conflates different periods of time. Close up, there was as much Michael Alig-style '90s club kid in there as there was Cocteau and Satie's Cubist ballet,Parade. Not to mention Rei Kawakubo's "flat" collection for Comme des Garçons for Fall 2012 and Watanabe's own history of formal experiments in pleating or his love of Breton stripes. And certainly, if we are talking about graphic girls as living dolls and clothing as performance, the street-style contingent cannot be ignored—they will lap up this collection, tailor made as it is to turn them into living tear sheets. And in this way, what Watanabe did today was as much 2014 as 1914, 1994, or 1984, and it both comments on and furthers the graphic march of people as corporeal Tumblrs. God help us.
27 September 2014
When Junya Watanabe has anything to say about his collections, it is often gnomic to the point of obfuscatory, but today's declaration, "Japanese tradition," was as succinctly accurate as you could wish. After what feels like years absorbed by the nuances of European workwear, Watanabe came home this season with a brilliant collection built onboro,the traditional Japanese patchwork that began centuries ago as peasant clothing. It was still the humble working man that the designer was celebrating, but boro has such a dense, furiously worked quality that each garment seemed to be telling a big story, rather like Raf Simons' mobile mood boards the other night.Patchwork has served Watanabe well in the past. Last season's jeans were instant fashion classics. But boro has a particular beauty that elevated this collection. As a whole suit—in the traditional indigo, but also in grayish and cream tones—it was the apotheosis of the hobo chic the designer has made a signature of.But boro wasn't the only Japanese tradition he was honoring. Ancient motifs like camellias and waves were integrated into patches of pinstripes, check, and denim, or woven into spectacular T-shirts. A soundtrack of that salt-of-the-earth traditional entertainment, sumo wrestling, accompanied the show. The models sported lacquered hairpieces by Tomihiro Kono, based on sumo styles. After a few minutes of wrestlers slapping and grunting, jazz kicked in, a reminder of Japan's extraordinary ability to absorb cultural imports and make them its own. Then there was a burst of the stringed koto, the country's national instrument. Accessories were workers' flip-flops and a simple square of printed indigo fabric knotted into a sack, carried in the hand or slung across the chest. Its rejection of excess means that Watanabe may have unwittingly come up with Spring's It-est man bag.
26 June 2014
Black was once the power color of fashion; fashion people always wore black. And in large part it was the Japanese designers who established this precedent in the eighties. At some point this changed. Now fashion people don't really wear that much black, at least not to fashion shows. Despite black being scientifically proven to be slimming—and who doesn't want to look thinner?—the details are missed by the cameras: You see, black is notoriously difficult to photograph. So as the street-style types stand outside of fashion shows and pose and pose and pose, their bright colors clashing, their accessories conflicting, our IQs diminishing as we watch them, the designers inside, the designers who make all of this possible, well, they are showing BLACK. And it's also what Junya Watanabe did today.Black is not for public spectacle, it's for private consumption. And there is an idea of something more private being expressed in collections this season, something for a more personal pleasure. Junya Watanabe's show today looked at a personal craft, that of patchwork. Here he once again took one element of fashion and obsessively, compulsively, literally pieced it together to form his Fall offering. At the same time, this collection was patched together with elements of his past, a personal patchwork of inspirations and ideas from his career as a designer. The music seemed to reinforce this point, itself a patchwork of classical piano pieces, rewound at times and distorted while the models walked at different speeds. Junya Watanabe said of his offering: "Patchwork madness."It started off with circles, appliquéd and pieced together, radiating ever wider. Mainly in black, but it was the textures and materials that mattered: from brocades to bouclé, velvets to satins, silk to sequins, leather (or leatherette) to lace. The circles built the silhouettes, the enveloping, cocooning, tunic shapes and the cloaking coats, occasionally bursting into ruffles or layered with tulle for skirts. Midway through, the familiar quilted down jackets, made so desirable and cut like couture that had appeared in his Fall 2009 collection, made an appearance again. Then on to strips of fabrics, running like sedimentary rock formations, a strata of fashion, a clue to its history.Once again Junya Watanabe has proved what a great designer he is with this collection. Prodding the past but always producing a notion of the present, he continually moves forward.
While over the past year he has become known for his patchwork jeans, worn by fashion people far and wide as well as those not averse to the cameras, today he short-circuited this signature at the same time as strengthening the notion of patchwork. That's the power of black: It could well be the answer to image fatigue.
28 February 2014
Junya Watanabe's invitation demanded a long, hard look. It was a photograph of a pub. A unicorn was sitting at the bar; outside, a trio of chunky guys in panda, tiger, and lucha libre masks were having a pint. The image played like a left-field vision of how the world views Londoners: myth-dogged, booze-soaked, slightly exotic in their ordinariness. Any one of those explained the Japanese fascination with the UK's capital city. Junya Watanabe added one more, his own personal favorite: "Fish and chips."Shown in a mansion on Avenue Foch, a more elevated venue than usual, Watanabe's collection was a love letter to London, typically idiosyncratic. The hairstyles celebrated the city's youth cults: Teddy boy ducktail, Mod crop, glam rocker's mullet, punk mohawk. The top half of each outfit was a British archetype. Outfit number one: the city gent in his bowler hat, gray flannel jacket, businessman's stripe and tie. Bottom half, the patchwork jeans that have been such a sensation in Junya's women's line that, Dover Street Market reports, men have been buying them as well.That top-bottom division continued throughout the show, with the proportions of the jackets stretching or shrinking like a pocket history of British tailoring: the elongated Edwardian jacket, the Mods' bum-freezer, the utilitywear of the hunting, shooting, and fishing set. Always with a properly sartorial collar and tie, the latter tied in the Windsor knot that George V bequeathed to men's style.A dozen ravishing mohair sweaters, snagged and laddered in true punk style, closed the show. The music came from London-born King Krule and Oasis, though we're not sure how bolshy professional Mancunians Noel and Liam Gallagher would feel about soundtracking a paean to London.
16 January 2014
If one designer can make the most vilified, the most ephemeral, the most transitory of things that are normally passed by (while perhaps being scowled at) into full-blown fashion statements that are desirable, monumental, and skilled (leaving you deeply impressed), it is Junya Watanabe. And he did it again in his show today.Hippies, crusty ravers, anybody who does not wash their hair, claiming, "It will clean itself," the idea of going to Goa, macramé, home crafts, didgeridoos…and so on. This could be seen as a collection and a show incorporating some of this reviewer's most vilified things. And yet that would only be on the surface; in the hands of Junya Watanabe, such horrors became a font of fantastic inspiration from which much else followed.Take as a starting point the humble T-shirt tassel—that fringed decoration most beloved in the beach T-shirt trade and by the bored home customizer. Watanabe used it heavily, immaculately, and to extravagant effect. While many have been using tight accordion pleating for architectural experimentation this season, Watanabe used fringing. It started in black T-shirting silhouettes, fringed to long, extravagant proportions, some precisely braided and beautifully draped. By the time those looks turned beige and gray, there was a sense of the oddly ancient and classical to the collection. The hair might have started as that of the crusty raver, with messy small braids piled altogether, but the connotations were turning into something else entirely.This is when Aphex Twin's song "Digeridoo" launched in with complete insistence. It turns out that Richard D. James (Aphex Twin) is not such a fan of the instrument either, and he labored hard to create a similar drone electronically. If anything is a metaphor for what Junya Watanabe does, it's that. In this collection there was a link between past, present, and future; it was the idea of something changing but forever remaining the same that was defined as "Folklore" by Watanabe.Now the fringing took on the connotations of the American West, and was simultaneously evocative in the Richard Avedon, Ralph Lauren, and Native American sense. The fringing was joined by delicate, horizontal cascading cuts. Suede, or rather suedette, took the place of buckskin, entirely elegant, especially in one open-backed, floor-length coat-dress. Watanabe's excellent denim once again featured, and it led back to one of the new folklore figures encountered earlier.
Here, wearing extravagant pheasant-feather headdresses, Watanabe's new tribe finished, with the music swiftly cut. It was a journey through both the playful and profound.
27 September 2013
In an unusually forthcoming concession, Junya Watanabe said he "wanted to convey resort in a cool way" with his Spring collection. The resort he imagined was clearly somewhere with access to the great outdoors—hiking and fishing featured prominently as leisure activities, and Junya's direct inspiration was a company called Seil Marschall, which has, according to the label, been hand-making backpacks in "Good Old Germany" since 1896.So the backpacks—and fishermen's bags—were the collection's fulcrum, matched to the mutated outerwear that was another essential component of the show. An inside-out patchwork of construction has become a clear Junya signature. As sophisticated as it undoubtedly is, it had a charming Elmer Fudd-ish naivete here, which the porkpie hats and sockless oxfords did their big-city best to counter.For this onlooker, every Junya show reaches a point—one outfit—where the designer's intent coalesces into clarity. Here, that eureka moment was a cherry-red hiking jacket (Junya doesmeanreds and pinks), after which the clothes had a little more lead in their pencil, and resort did indeed take on a cool(-ish) mien. There was even a full-on floral—not to be confused with a Hawaiian shirt, even though a hibiscus featured prominently. Still, the merest whiff of Hawaii stirred memories of Junya's Aloha shirts from more than ten years ago, when his fascination with Americana led him down fascinatingly fetishistic paths.What's happened since was defined by today's invitation, a contemplative image of primary-colored garden chairs facing a view of a tree-lined lake and mountains. It fit with the sweet, companionable mood of the collection itself, with the models greeting one another like hikers on a trail as they crisscrossed the catwalk. If there was ever angst in a Junya collection (and therewas), it has been processed and filed away.
27 June 2013
Junya Watanabe seems to be in love with the idea of the ready-made—a piece of clothing that a whole collection can sometimes spin around in its many permutations. In recent years, season after season, he has presented something archetypal and iconic and, somehow, reinvigorated the view of it. During this process he has never bored the viewer or the wearer with the pieces' multitudinous forms; it's something of an achievement. Perhaps the greatest example of this was Watanabe's black leather jacket collection of Fall 2011, which also dealt with, in a hefty aside, the codified garments of punk. Quite a few people attempting to do punk collections this season should really read that one and weep. In fact, it appears that many have: Watanabe is one of the designers that has been most heavily borrowed from recently.So today, at his own show, where Watanabe seemingly presented his own past collections as the ready-mades and decided to liberally lift from himself, there was a kind of cheeky meta-fashion. It was like a recent-hits compilation (and Watanabe's hits have a hefty dose of sampling) with a variety of remixes. Nevertheless, what he offered felt fresh, fun, and audacious today. He even accompanied the looks with high heels for the first time. They added to a sense of rebellion, maybe even a rebellion against the preconceived notions of Junya Watanabe.The black leather jacket collection had a starring role, coming to the fore and peppering much of the proceedings. The Perfecto-style jacket,thesymbol of rebellion, seemed to become fused with the bric-a-brac of leftover fashion in the first looks. These were the kind of fabrics found hanging around in secondhand shops. The models' bird's-nest wigs also gave that feeling of the detritus of fashion. There were hints of the reconfigured denim from Watanabe's Spring 2009 Africa collection, as well as his punk patchwork jeans from Fall 2011, here given a much bigger starring role. An additional spin on the trench also appeared again, this time seemingly cross-fertilized with the Perfecto, producing a profusion of zips. It all added up to a feeling of playfulness, and yet a strange profundity about the passing disposability of fashions.If Rei Kawakubo is the queen of Paris fashion in terms of consistent innovation, then logic dictates that Junya Watanabe is the crown prince.
Yet does a wider public quite realize this? Watanabe is one ofthegreat contemporary designers; he's hardly an unknown, but he deserves a much broader audience. Hopefully, with this collection he will get it.
1 March 2013
The image on the invitation—a young knight in tinfoil armor—gave nothing away. Or rather, it artfully misled, because the second the show started, the klezmer soundtrack cued a particular response to the clothes on the catwalk. Just as klezmer music conjures up visions of Jewish community life in Eastern Europe over a century ago, the clothes had the vintage feel of immigrants from those communities arriving in the New World, proudly wearing their carefully patched suits and big overcoats, trying their best to look like gentlemen. Patchwork has been a staple of Junya's vocabulary for a while, but this was one time when it looked like it was actually patching something.All the models sported felt bowlers, a few had pencil moustaches that gave them a rakish caste, like they were some kind of performer, a klezmer musician perhaps. Or, because the shrunken proportions of the boiled wool jackets suggested Charlie Chaplin, a clown. In any case, it felt like Junya was spinning a folk tale, the kind where children become knights in shining armor in their dreams. One of the models even reminded us of antic Struwwelpeter with his big froth of hair, except this particular mannequin moved with the robotic glide of a somnambulant.There is usually something in a Junya collection that references the dignity of labor. Here, it arrived in the form of what looked like utility wear, layered underneath the patched, fitted jackets as though the wearer had thrown on his gladder rags at the end of a hard day's work. Same thing with the denims, patched and, in one instance, suspendered.Of course, this is just an onlooker's pipe dream. Fact is, the strongest pieces in the collection were the most unambiguously contemporary: a quilted navy duffel, and tan parka.
17 January 2013
The sound of a needle on a vinyl record indicated the start of Junya Watanabe's Spring show. Yet that needle turned out to be a digitally sampled sound, and the scratch of the vinyl became the insistent beat of a collection that had an energy that wouldn't stop.Watanabe is often in thrall to the romance of the ready-made and is a master of it. The perfect permutations of archetypal garments such as a black leather jacket, a trenchcoat, or a tea dress have all exerted a pull in recent collections—and are motifs that have frequently cropped up in other designers' offerings later on. Yet it was always Watanabe who, literally and metaphorically, showed them how it's done.Today's collection was something of a break from that cycle. That is, unless you count the ready-made as sportswear—though there was more going on in this collection than could be boiled down in that way. The first model quickly and purposefully appeared like a sprite in curvilinear orange Airtex mesh, with what looked like flames licking round the body. Her glinting headgear was a mosaic of mirror shards atop a pale white face. There was very little opportunity for thought and meaning before she was gone, to be quickly replaced by another and another and another… This collection was utterly unrelenting in its pace and purpose and all the better for it.The fabrics and the trainers were supplied by Puma, but this was not a collaborative line in the strictest sense of the phrase. Rather it reflected Watanabe's own fascination with the subject matter and his own take on silhouettes exploiting a sporting technical language. At the same time, with its insistent club beat, there was a definite feel of the nineties take on sportswear in all of this. The silhouettes reflected the kind of street-wear brands that proliferated in London and Tokyo then and were worn in clubs at the midpoint of the decade. Things like the futuristic Vexed Generation. Here this was combined with that decade's take on the sixties; there was something infinitely Pierre Cardin-ish about these space-age creatures in their mirrored headgear and their short, tight silhouettes.There was almost an idea of nostalgia for the future from the past in this show. You get the feeling that progress is not dead for Watanabe and he is always searching for a route to it in fashion. While there may have been a looking back to go forward in this collection, what he presented was utterly contemporary in feel, something both new and now.
It was one of the most exciting shows of the week.
28 September 2012
The impressionistic image of a city skyline on the invitation looked like it might have been taken from a park—Hyde Park, perhaps. Or was that just the London mood that was cued by Beatles tracks on the soundtrack—gentle, summery songs like "Blackbird" and "Here Comes the Sun"? They were the musical match for a slightly earnest, sweetly urban collection from Junya. He said he wanted to move away from structure, but the collection he showed today didn't movesofar away that it wouldn't make young guys feel like sharp-dressed men. And when his models doffed their jackets to stroll the catwalk one more time, it actually felt like Junyawantedus to focus on the structure—or at least the interiors—of the jackets he'd designed. There certainly seemed to be an awful lot going on inside, with collaged linings and some interesting seaming. There was a shadow of bespoke here, which felt like another London reference. And pick any outfit—a windowpane check suit over a floral Liberty-print shirt, a high-closing double-breasted with elongated Bermudas, the floppy-posh-boy feel of the pale blues and pinks—to get still more.
28 June 2012
David Lynch's new albumCrazy Clown Timeskewers familiar musical genres—just likeMulholland Drivewas a forensic dissection of film noir cliché—and that makes it some kind of aural analogy for Junya Watanabe's work in fashion. So it was purest logic that Lynch's sweet-sour music joined with Junya's clothes today in a celebration of the severely hybrid.The designer mutated fundamental menswear codes. Everything from pinstripes to Prince of Wales checks, Oxford shoes to riding boots, camel coats to military capes—to create bold new forms. A trenchcoat became a funnel-neck cape; cuffed pants were opened out into the trailing tails of a pinstriped jacket. The ingenuity of such pieces was practically confounding.Equally confounding was the passage of dévoréd, flocked, latticed apronlike dresses that closed the show. Colored in rose and mustard and burgundy, they had a deconstructed dustbowl-chic feel. That might suggest another of Junya's outsider analyses of Americana. As in, you put together the mutation and the deconstruction and you've got yourself a thumbnail of a society in the throes of collapse.
2 March 2012
"Work," said Junya Watanabe, with a double fist-pump for emphasis, after a show whose theme seemed to be just that. There were tractors, trains, and diggers on the invitation, farmers and engineers on the catwalk. At a moment when there are so many men out of work, you could think Junya was making a statement about the dignity of labor. Or maybe this was his elegy for a prelapsarian era of full employment. Therewas, after all, something nostalgic about the look of patched plaid shirts, bib-front overalls, and work pants hanging off big suspenders, just as there is something old-school about tractors in the age of agribusiness. But the look harked back to Junya's Spring collection in the garden. The topstitched trousers with rolled cuffs and the blanket-check paneling on shirt jackets also echoed the show before that, the one set in a city park. Junya used to favor more edge with his menswear (his Travis-Bickle-at-Woodstock collection will always be one of the great men's presentations of the aughts). Perhaps it's now a case of him settling into a gentle groove where he can make his own bucolic stand against the predations of modern times. But the groove is a littletoogentle. We could hope for more spirit from a man who, on the evidence of that perpetual smile, at least, has clearly had the good fortune to turn his work into play.
19 January 2012
It pays to have a human encyclopedia at your elbow to help in decoding a Junya Watanabe presentation. When Gene Krell,VogueJapan's seasoned fashion director, identified the Argentinian musicians on the vintage recordings that made up today's soundtrack, that was one more clue in Junya's South American puzzle. Therealgiveaway, though, had to be the designer's beloved Perfecto reconfigured as a pale blue leather bolero with ruffled sleeves fit for a mambo king.The bolero arrived on the heels of a series of light, graceful dresses that looked cut from the lace tablecloth you might find in the pampas homestead where the mambo king lived with his queen. It was easy to imagine the lace being laboriously over-embroidered by women who were perpetuating a craft learned from their mothers, who'd learned it fromtheirmothers, and so on through time. And it was equally easy to imagine Junya being drawn to such a notion. He usually starts somewhere very traditional before he makes his own hybrid adjustments. That happened here when the lace dresses began to grow asymmetric panels of black, or when what looked like spectral military outerwear put in an appearance (a black tulle flight jacket?). The bolero reappeared as a truncated trenchcoat. Then thetrenchcoatreappeared as a coat/dress/cape hybrid whose elegant precision gave the effect of wings folded around the model.It was again thanks to Mr. Krell that the spectator shoes could be placed in the big picture. Dancers of the style of Cuban salsa known as casino wore them. By extension, Kamo's spectacular headgear, composed of rooster feathers, could be construed as some kind of reference to Latin dandy cocks of the walk. But ultimately, all that information was brainiac window dressing. What counted were the clothes themselves—romantic, intriguing, pretty, playful, and ever so slightly subversive in the Watanabe way.
30 September 2011
The invitation showed a sweep of grassy farmland extending to the clear blue horizon. It summoned us to the garden of a school for the deaf in a southern part of Paris, not a grand ornamental garden, mind, but a rather more humble plot of vegetables and flowers. Then, to the tune of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord," models began crisscrossing the grass, dressed in bib-front overalls, patched cotton work shirts, and wellies. With their flowing hair and the occasional beard, they looked like Harrison himself on the cover ofAll Things Must Pass, his first solo album after The Beatles breakup. He was in his gentleman farmer phase then, and, for a while today, it looked like Junya was also getting himself back to the garden. There'd been a last-minute switch from the school terrace to the greensward, with its thick, glossy hedge. It made a more fitting backdrop for his natural men in their worn farm clothes. But once Junya began dropping in technical outerwear, the collection became less about the farm and more about his outsider's fascination with American utilitywear.The waxed-cotton storm jacket, the red mac (in pleather, not oilcloth), and the plaid lined parka had the element of primary-colored surprise that captivates Junya's cult time after time. So did the tech jackets in orange, khaki, and sky blue that topped chambray overalls. He's a great colorist: His tricolor desert boots with Tricker's will stand out next spring.Junya's presentations always defy the conventional fashion show momentum, which dictates a build to some kind of dressy climax. But for once, this show actually got darker and dressier as it drew to a close. There were still the overalls, but now they were black—and paired with white shirts. There was also a brass-buttoned blazer as polished as bespoke, bar the fact it was patchworked from denim. Though Junya will never give an inch when he's queried about his motivations backstage, you can imagine that that is the kind of garment that most tickles his fancy.
23 June 2011
There are few things as totemic as a black leather biker jacket. And there are few things Junya Watanabe likes more than a fashion totem. This season, his characteristic refusal to give any meaningful statements about his work made more sense than usual. That's because the jacket had spoken for him. From Brando to Vicious, it's been the badge of rebellion, freedom, the consummate outsider. Junya already probed its iconic status in his Fall 2007 men's collection, but here his approach was simultaneously more elegant and more subversive.That was partly because a decision as perversely simple as adding an hourglass silhouette to a black leather jacket automatically transformed it into a fetish object. Hips sculpted in skin over a flaring pleated skirt were serene yet disturbing, which, in the big picture, could be a metaphor for Junya's entire career. His models were the very embodiment of the notion, quietly pretty with coxcombs of disordered blond or red hair erupting from their scalps. And the leathers they wore were gracefully transmogrified into couturelike volumes: capes, cocoons, ruched sweeps of cowhide. Some of it was real, some of it was fake. All of it was indistinguishable. Perhaps that was Junya's way of saying that the high and low divisions of fashion are truly meaningless now. But at the same time he seemed to be acknowledging the heritage of the garment he'd chosen to spotlight by dressing his leathers in sweeps of fauxsauvagefur. Wild ones indeed.As ever with Junya, the resonances rang loud and clear. He soundtracked his show with a sonorous male voice reading Arthur Rimbaud's "Ophelia," a beautiful, arch-decadent text. Pair that with the leather jacket, the flared skirt, the sloppy knits, the Chelsea boots, and you'd have a tidy composite of asoixante-huitard, the student staple of the Parisian riots in 1968. There's an upcoming Saint Laurent exhibition in Paris that highlights that period, seminal for both society and the fashion that reflected it.
4 March 2011
"No meaning." So spakeJunya Watanabeat the end of one of the most beautifully paced, quietly emotional menswear shows we're likely to see all season. Woody Allen and Diane KeatonAnnie Hall-ed on the soundtrack alongside Keith Jarrett's lyrical piano, while lovelorn young men wandered idly in the kind of timeless collegiate garb that lovelorn young men wander idly in. C'mon, Junya, tell us it was torn from the soul of your extraordinary relationship with Americana.Nope. Won't do.Honestly, a working journo could tear his hair out.Yes, the man is impenetrable, but eventually reason reasserts itself, and you realize that Junya understands that fashion is not abouthim, it's aboutus, and the way we relate to clothes. Today, that relationship solicited a particularly misty-eyed response. The set—two park benches in a rooftop studio flooded with natural daylight—had an off-Broadway staginess that instantly intrigued. The interplay of the models suggested an undercurrent the audience wasn't quite party to. And the clothes played to archetypal characters: professor and student, young rivals in love, New England weekenders.It was one of those moments when Junya's relatively literal interpretation of his scenario (given that there is one, which he, of course, would insist was nonsense) produced pieces that were as desirable as they were comprehensible. A peacoat, a duffel coat, a Fair Isle cardigan, a black leather blouson…who doesn't recognize these clothes? But Junya inserted a design element that lifted each piece into another realm. The Fair Isle was shawl-collared, the duffel had a fetishistic toggle, the peacoat was hybridized with a hunter's jacket. And a buffalo check lined the blouson.Junya's fashion bricolage pulled together elements that were opposed to the point of randomness. A Fair Isle hoodie? A sailor jacket in khaki? The college boys that ruminated on his park bench at the beginning of the show had transmogrified into hunters by its end. Maybe Mr. Watanabe is as astute an anthropologist as he is a designer—though if he is, he ain't telling.
20 January 2011
When he showed stripes in his Spring collection for men, Junya Watanabe said that was what he felt like wearing next summer, and the show was correspondingly no more complicated than that. Stripes were also the dominant motif in his women's show today, and there was an equal lack of complication in clothes that were a sporty, summery counterpart to the menswear—maybe transported a century or so earlier to the beach in Biarritz. The marine connection was explicit in the nautical motifs on silken scarf-printed smocks and sailor tops. There were echoes of Edwardian bathing costumes—and maybe even antique tennis gear—in striped leggings under long, drop-waisted dresses. The Edwardiana that underlies so much Japanese fashion was also palpable in the proportions: long over longer. But Junya emphasized the lightness of the layering with coats cut from sheer nylon and polyester.In a Paris season where the word "feminine" is being bandied around with gay abandon, this was as pretty and feminine a collection as Watanabe has offered. Which is perhaps why, by way of contrast, he called on hairdresser Katsuya Kamo to perform some of his alien magic above the neckline. The models wore toxic-colored wigs under their squashy governess' hats, and their faces were obscured by masks they held in place with a bit between their teeth. "Tokyo doll" was the designer's own description for the effect he was after with his collection, but these dolls hadn't had their faces painted in yet, and there were odd moments when the combination of mask and stripe made you think prisoner as much as sailor.
1 October 2010
"They're clothes I want to wear next summer," explained Junya Watanabe after a nautically themed show that was as direct as anything he's offered before. The prospect of going boating must make him very happy indeed, because the soundtrack was the kind of bubbly jazz funk that underscored good times in bygone days. It was that ideal weekend moment that Watanabe's holidaywear evoked: sailing away in a mackintosh jacket in a jaunty shade of red or yellow, a Breton striped knit, and a flat cap. Or perhaps you'll opt for a more classic navy parka and sailor sweater.This designer has always been remarkably good at fetishizing practical western clothing, serving it back to us in ways that make it seem almost inexplicably irresistible. (His huntin', shootin', and fishin' collection, for example.) This time, that alien tug was missing, perhaps because what we saw was just what we got: crisp, fresh, summery, suburban clothes in preppy shades of navy, sky blue, and pink, not to mention stripes. Lots of stripes. It felt so familiar that there was no Watanabe frisson—unless, of course, you count as a thrill the vision of him settling behind the tiller for a day of tacking and jibing.
24 June 2010
There's nothing newsy about the fact that Junya Watanabe fuses street clothes with something romantic-y. It's his beat. At this point, the things to keep an eye on are the by-products of his seasonal excursions into cross-referencing, rather than the conceit itself. For Fall, then, it wasn't the fact that he used a military-Edwardiana-vaguely New Look conglomeration that was particularly arresting, but the way his work concentrated the eye on skirts. Flared, flouncy, pleated, and generally bursting into swishy lower-body volume, they represented a brilliantly focused resolution of one way the fashionable silhouette is being reshaped for winter.Watanabe's use of military-issue look-alike fabrics, parkas, anoraks, camouflage print, and MA-1 flight jackets had no aggression about it—he employs the source material more in the sense of day-to-day, season-in-season-out practical classics, examples of which are permanently present in the young person's wardrobe these days. And he's a gentle soul. The gospel choir music on his soundtrack, singing of redemption, had his audience tearing up while scribbling their personal shopping lists for Fall. You sense he's a nice guy who just wants to make everyone relax and feel happy about this stress-y fashion business.The ideas really got going when Watanabe showed a tulle bustle shooting out of the back of a narrow military-drab skirt. From there, he riffed on accordion pleats, sometimes transposing them into drapey dresses over a base of black ribbed knitwear. The MA-1 jacket was cutely cropped, sometimes streamlined into fitted coats and then reduced to sweet, fake fur-lined bonnets. Nevertheless, it was his nailing of the skirt volume issue—crucially without dirndl-ish waist bulk—that will have his followers trotting happily off, eager to score a key component to make their wardrobes work anew next winter.
5 March 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
21 January 2010
In a season of sheerness and lingerie, casual and military, a woman who likes a trouser suit in her wardrobe might as well be cast out into the wilderness—if it weren't for Junya Watanabe. His collection was wholly about menswear for women—tailored jacket, slim pants, and shirting explored in a rigorous way that deftly sidestepped the dread image of the career pantsuit. Sometimes, Japanese designers are thought of as marginal: This felt more like the capturing of a market.Watanabe's models, with their towering, twisted head wraps, walked on flat, pointy lace-ups with a brisk dignity (no tricky footwear to negotiate, no fuss with accessories, no danger of wardrobe malfunction). The show began with a midnight blue jacket and narrow trousers in tonic silk and proceeded through dozens of variations in menswear checks with the obsessive logic Watanabe brings to every collection.The steady processing of his theme drew the eye to the detail: the hip darts that made jackets jut slightly in front; the way he occasionally switched the grain of fabric to cut a narrow trouser on the bias. Moving on to pristine white shirtdresses over black leggings, Watanabe also added femininity and drape to the mix, eventually transposing the black-and-white graphics of checks into a riff on geometrics, including a couple of brilliant shirred, checkered synthetic tissue body pieces with a frill in the hem. The genius of the collection was that, for all of the hip experimentation, it was fully tooled as pragmatic daywear—avant-garde, but completely utilitarian.
2 October 2009
Style.com did not review the Spring 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
25 June 2009
Leave it to Junya Watanabe to take a generic utility garment—in this case, a chill-blocking down jacket—and elevate it to an incredible level of romantic imagination. "Feathers and air" were in his mind when he began work with the tubular components of a puffer and then started treating it to myriad turns of construction that lifted it far away from its casual origins. It's a Junya-ism to transform almost any material that comes his way into an Edwardian riding coat, but that was just the warm-up. To the strains of arias from Puccini'sMadame ButterflyandTosca, he made concentric circles of padded nylon serially assume the characteristics of Poiret cocoons, cloaks, capes, stoles, peplum jackets, peacoats. After an interlude in which Watanabe gathered in thoughts about draping (a few black asymmetric tunics worn over leggings) and veiled gold lamé, the process took off again as an increasingly free-form exercise in soft sculpture. By the end, gilded chains were encircling the poufy forms, now reconfigured as dresses and wraps.Still, as ingenious and dramatic as it was, this latest work is only a continuation of Watanabe's signature knack of performing context-shifting tweaks and hybridization procedures on the "found" materials of commonplace clothing—African batiks, denim, Liberty prints, the stuff of military uniforms, and Chanel-ish tweeds, to list only a few. In one way, it always gives the sense of watching a master class in conceptual Japanese thinking, but in another, it's better than that. Watanabe's real talent is his humility. He never allows himself to run so far into the outer reaches of theory that the practical value of the original article is lost. In this collection, suffice to say, there are warm winter coats that are just warm winter coats, and those will sell as functional classics.
6 March 2009
Excursions to the African continent have been a persistent theme in the Spring shows: surely something to do with the urge to get as far away from the West's problems as possible. Junya Watanabe has gone there, too, but on his runway there was no sense of panicked escapism. As the sound of spring birdsong twittered on the soundtrack, out came girls carrying sheaves of flowers in towering head wraps, and an instant atmosphere of sunny serenity filled the room.The beauty of it was the way Watanabe struck such a beautiful balance between tribal references and his own signatures. He used colorful "African" prints with motifs of apples, hearts, and leaves, and bunched, twisted, and draped them into tops, tunics, and dresses, steadily mixing them with faded denim, bright gingham checks, pristine eyelets, and surprise splashes of leopard spots and neon. In fact, as Watanabe aficionados know, his interest in African drapery actually began in his hit collection of last Spring, and the patchworked denim pieces, fishtail skirts, and Edwardian jackets were in shapes that he's made his own throughout his career. With the crisscross flat leather sandals—a blessed sighting of some of the most comfortable footwear yet seen this season—it was a vision that offered something complete, natural, and unforced. Familiar, yes, but the kind of familiarity that breeds contentment.
29 September 2008
The road trip is a popular notion in Paris this season. With the way of the world, people just want to get up and go. But inevitably, Junya Watanabe's interpretation wasn't quite so straightforward. With Ringo Starr croaking "gonna take a sentimental journey" on the soundtrack, Junya's take on travelers initially suggested old colonials, decked out in Panama hats, collar-and-tie, jackets and Bermuda shorts, saddle shoes, and Argyle socks. And lugging huge, bruising suitcases, to boot (undoubtedly containing a Bible). But then the world of Watanabe literally flipped, as models doffed their navy blazers, reversed them, and returned in a khaki safari jacket, say, or something in gingham with a zip. The best was the tan blazer that transmogrified into a madras jean jacket, the kind of double-your-money proposition that cash-stretched voyagers would fall greedily upon. The cream of this particular jest was that it resulted from Junya's collaboration with Brooks Brothers, which was producing this segment of the collection for the first time. Other collaborators included Lacoste, Levi's, and—new this season—Baracuta, the U.K. makers of the Harrington jacket. Who knows if it's fetishism or respect or whatever—he sure isn't saying—but Junya's style anthropology remains one of the most riveting way stations on the Paris fashion calendar.
26 June 2008
Junya Watanabe is less a man of few words than a man of two words: That's all you'll ever get out of him (if you're lucky) after his shows. This season the words were "geometric sculpture"—but as gnomic as that sounds, the amazing collection of draped gray jersey he had assembled actually needs no further explanation. There's a level at which intellectual justifications for clothing become tedious, and there was nothing difficult to understand about the beautiful complexities of the charcoal- and marled-gray knits Watanabe wound and rewound about the body in a zillion inventive ways.Call it a modern progression of the thinking of Madame Grès or Madeleine Vionnet—the principles of Grecian draping thought through in knitted geometries of squares and circles. The technical wizardry allowed jersey to flow into belled sleeves that somehow were also part of the drape of a hem, or into fluid blousons and bubble-back silhouettes. The cumulative image was one of covered-up elegance (reemphasized by veiled faces and gloved hands) and a sinuous move toward a longer line.Both developments place Watanabe firmly at the leading edge of this season's new ideas, even if the way he shows—in a long, drawn-out fugue of a presentation—is singularly at odds with most designers' sound-bite style of showcasing their work these days. Still, it was well worth hanging on to the end, for that was when Watanabe sent out a spot-on contribution to the season's debate about the need for new tailoring. Leaving aside the trouser skirts, in which the crotch was situated three inches above the ankle (please), the top halves were extraordinary feats of cut. The arms-free peacoats—in which the sleeves seemed to have become part of a caped back—turned an ordinary basic into something immensely desirable. Like the jackets in Watanabe's last "African" collection, those will have women fighting at the registers.
25 February 2008
Parsing a Junya Watanabe collection involves careful consideration of the invitation and the venue. The former was a precisely bifurcated card, the latter was La Bourse, the historical Paris stock exchange. And, this being Watanabe, there'd have to be some element of Americana in there somewhere. A stockbroker with a split personality? Well, at a stretch, there was a sense of a buttoned-down-fit-to-burst individual in outfits as tense as a shrunken navy jacket worn with a shirt in a banker's stripe and a college tie. It was very Thom Browne-does-Tokyo. But equally, the clothes had a twisted preppiness that was the latest expression of the merry hell Junya plays with American dress codes. So glen plaid slacks boasted carpenter's loops, and a blazer sported the sleeves of a baseball jacket.In most Junya shows, there's a moment when the planet shifts sideways and his skewed vision takes flight. It didn't happen this time. The appearance of random buttonholes, stitched in red, promised the insinuation of utilitywear into the formality of tailoring, but there wasn't really much of a buzz to be derived from that (besides, Tomas Maier had already visited this notion in Milan). Such detailing did, however, suggest that Junya was plucking memories from his repertoire: the knit back on a blazer, the shrunken duffel, the racing stripes, a jacket's paisley pajama trim. But the show was too subtle to be some kind of greatest-hits collection. In fact, it was actually repetitive enough to feel like the designer was treading water, temporarily detached from the peculiar disembodied nostalgia that makes his menswear so memorable.
17 January 2008
The gauzy, drape-y beauty of Junya Watanabe's Spring collection adds something relaxed to the current dialogue about vivid color, goddess dressing, and flower prints. Somehow, without being remotely pedestrian, each of his bunchy wrapped dresses, whipped around the body out of one seamless piece of tablecloth linen—bright pink, followed by lime, cobalt, and cerulean blue—made summer dressing seem, for the first time this season, beautifully effortless.Using simple materials tethered to bands of utilitarian tape, Watanabe created shapes that wound asymmetrically here and there, baring the back or dipping off the shoulder. A man of few words, the only clue he gave afterward about his starting point was, "It all goes back to Africa." In retrospect, you could see what he meant, but, as with so many collections these days, it's not so much the conceptual origin that matters—only whether the designer transforms it into something a woman can imagine wearing. On that score, this collection delivered a rare sequence of delightful surprises.After the drapery, Watanabe worked in superbright ruched chiffon jackets with pocket detailing edged in strips of gold lace—Coco-like in front, but crafted into scrolled eighteenth-century peplums in the back. Following that, he tackled the flowers, making bloused smocks in forties-influenced tea-dance prints, then breaking out into classic arts-and-crafts Liberty-print tan lawn cotton dresses. Suffice to say, it amounted to one of the season's most sensitive interpretations of overground trend from an underground source—experimental, yet never deviating from Watanabe's recognizable signatures.
1 October 2007
For anyone concerned about the environmental consequences of Western society's increasingly disposable attitude to clothing, Junya Watanabe's latest show turned the reuse-recycle mantra on its head, in the process producing some drolly appealing keepers. Picture, if you will, Latin American coffee sacks tailored into sleek jackets, or old boxers rejigged as combat shorts. Such sartorial ingenuity isn't uncommon in societies where every little bit helps to get by—the Panama hats and Latin groove on the soundtrack helped suggest such a place—so one was irresistibly drawn to the notion that Junya might be commenting on the Western clothing that gets baled up, shipped out, and distributed throughout the majority world. Hence synthetic-looking argyles and dress shirts from Brooks Brothers (one of this season's collaborators), washed until they were wrinkled, shrunken shadows of their former selves. That's one way that Junya literally warped tradition. He was talking about "relaxed suiting," which definitely applied to pinstriped jackets and shorts that looked straight out of the washing machine, or the candy-striped, Riviera-casual pieces produced in collaboration with French company Saint James.But it was Watanabe's subtle ingenuity that drew one back to a washed-out madras suit, or shorts that looked like cutoff dress pants, or shirts that might have been reconstituted pajamas. As a consummate fashion outsider, Junya has often compelled us to reexamine our own dress codes. After the reexamination, the recycling?
28 June 2007
After a season of dressed-up eighteenth-century dandy formality, Junya Watanabe took it down again for Fall, returning to rework a different classic register—biker, instead of Beethoven. (He called it "Romantic in Black.") Essentially, it was a show of little riffs up and down the scale of fabric and construction/deconstruction, the sort of riffs that have become familiar at the house of Comme des Garçons over the years—i.e., stiff leather (real and fake), overdyed viscose, school-uniform knits, polka dots, asymmetry, and the hybridization of garments.It wasn't one of Watanabe's confrontational punk war cries—more of a teen-rebel look with a softer side. This is for a girl who will pull on a flower-print dress (albeit one she's boil-washed with several loads of black) with her leather jacket, a shrunken cardigan, and a pair of pointy biker-cum-Western boots. In many dresses, the cardigan was fused in and wrapped at the back, sending the frock's pretty lines of tucks and minute ruffles off-kilter. Overall, there was plenty to appreciate, such as the way Watanabe manipulated those unbending leathers: here, to make a zipper ripple down the front of a jacket to echo a frill-front shirt; there, to pick out a fitted fishtail of Alaïa-like seaming in the back of a waisted coat. Look at this as a collection of young, casual separates, and it doesn't take any leap of imagination to see how these pieces will sell, but then again, this wasn't one of those Watanabe shows that provokes its audience to think any big thoughts.
26 February 2007
There are designers who are happy to wax lyrical about their inspirations—and then there's Junya Watanabe. He flatly rejected any suggestion of subtext or deeper meaning in his latest collection. He doesn't even like motorbikes. Bikerwear just happened to be a convenient jumping-off point for one of his characteristic meditations on iconic American menswear. Ah, yes, but that's a subtext, whether he likes it or not. Bike boys are laden with connotations (rebellion, the freedom of the open road, the cult of the outsider) and Watanabe underscored the connection by his choice of collaborator: Vanson Leathers, a leading American manufacturer of motorcycle jackets, pants, and biking accessories.The Watanabe way is to leave no sartorial cliché undeconstructed, so he broke down the biker jacket into its component parts—collar, belt, zips, etc.—and put them back together in unexpected ways: an elongated version in felted wool, for instance, or a tight little red number, also in felted wool, or a stand-up-collared example with the zipper trailing around the neckline. A fabric biker jacket and matching pants looked like a new kind of suit. And the zips that were slashed all over the Levi's items (the latest examples of his ongoing partnership with the brand) added an edge.This designer's eye for a classic brand with which to collaborate is unerring. As well as Vanson, he settled on Barbour this time. The khaki oilskin had "cult" written all over it. And yet, in the end, this collection wasn't vintage Watanabe. Perhaps the source material was just too finite, because the delightful disorientation he usually offers on the lethally familiar was not much in evidence here.
26 January 2007
Striking up images of Beau Brummel and Beethoven, Junya Watanabe effectively cut off the urban uprising he broke out last season in mid-yell. All you needed to know was there in look one: a high-collared frothy ruffled shirt knotted in a cravat; cutaway tailcoat; narrow pants; and pointy, patent lace-ups. The formal, decorative, historicist look was a sharp change of mood, but not a volte-face. Watanabe regularly shifts between romance and punk, and the reason he doesn't look schizoid is that, funnily enough, the same elements always turn up either side of the divide.Thus, Watanabe's signature tailcoats, nip-waist dandy jackets, lean boy-cut pants, and shirts were switched this season into baroque-splendid fabrics instead of ripped-up army fatigues. Or so it might have appeared. On close inspection, the first several looks were cut in denim, followed by narrow, vaguely fifties Teddy Boy drainpipes—a touch of street swagger to undercut the poshness, and a flash of Watanabe's jean genius. After that, he moved the collection on up into baroque printed paisleys, as well as beige chino-gabardines appliquéd with white lace, and tuxedo pants. He worked the thought through into full-length shirtdresses in tucked lawn or lace—and a final skirt that exited in a flourish of cotton shirt ruffles rippling into a train. Masculine but feminine, romantic but modern, smart but wearable—it was all that, but the most difficult contradiction the accomplished Watanabe pulled off was that this collection looked new, yet totally identifiable as his own.
1 October 2006
"America is a first-rate place," declaimed a sampled voice on the soundtrack, as Junya Watanabe continued his exploration of all-American cultural icons. At the heart of this collection was a collaboration with Nike, featuring a range of shoes that were exact replicas of 30-year-old models, but Converse, Champion, Levi's, Kangol, and Lacoste logos also appeared in various hybrid forms. No, they're not all U.S. companies, but they've all put down solid roots in the land of the free, home of the brand extension.The hybrid is Watanabe's ideal—here, it was spectacularly expressed in tracksuits transformed into tailored suits, an ingenious but entirely logical combination of two modern male uniforms. A Levi's jean jacket, meanwhile, was recut in the synthetic primaries one associates with workout wear. Better yet, Champion sweatshirting was transmogrified into a biker jacket. In a season that's gone sports-mad, these were some of the smartest ideas on display. The same cannot be said, though, for the retro sports uniforms that crowded the catwalk for the finale—those were too muchA League of Their Own.As the soundtrack suggested, there is a healthy dollop of irony in everything Watanabe does, but after the show, he sounded genuine when he claimed that his menswear is much more an exercise in nostalgia than technology or experimentation. And from this collection, it was clear that he regards the past with a humorous, but loving, eye.
3 July 2006
An electrical snafu postponed the start of Junya Watanabe's show long enough for the Sex Pistols' anthem "Anarchy in the UK" to play three times on a backstage sound system. Sitting in the dark, one editor wondered out loud if the delay were intentional—a valid question given this Japanese designer's appetite for subversion. Just then, a minuet kicked in and Watanabe's model troops stormed the runway in unison wearing army green, as if to say, "There's a war on, people. Have you forgotten?"Last season's spiky paper headgear had been transformed into ominous masks. Made from electrical tape, tufts of black hair, and spiky silver studs, they looked every bit as disturbing as the similar hoods on his countryman Jun Takahashi's runway earlier in the week. The long dresses Watanabe constructed from patchworks of concert T-shirts for spring reappeared, but this time they were pieced together from fatigues, camouflage material, and green lace. Continuing the military theme, he took a battalion's worth of army jackets and worked them up into the trenches, parkas, and tail coats trailing straps that he's know for. And for an added dose of symbolism, he crocheted red, white, and blue into his camo sweaters.The great thing about Watanabe, though, is that you never sense he's being provocative just for the sake of it. It was a thrill to watch him refine his timely ideas, and make exciting and, yes, wearable clothes in the process. Especially when many others, as they return to and rework the highlights of mid-century design, are resisting just that: timeliness.
3 March 2006
Fear isn't necessarily an emotion one expects to feel at a fashion show, but the thousand-yard stare on one of Junya Watanabe's models sent a frisson down the front row. The guy was a ringer for Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. Watanabe, though, was actually taking his cues from another vigilante psycho. His models in their Mohawks and army-surplus outerwear (with deeply ironic LOVE appliqués) evoked Travis Bickle ofTaxi Driver, the Scorsese movie whose soundtrack played throughout.The designer claimed Bickle as a positive inspiration. "Motivation," he said via his translator. "Men should take charge." However dubious the line of logic, it produced some intriguing clothes. Travis's camo appeared as a beautifully cut jacket; olive-drab made an equally elegant coat. Or it was patchworked for a pair of trousers. A flight jacket was elongated into a parka.These were all minor masterpieces of recycling. But what made them more remarkable was the sense of an outsider's eye trained wonderingly on an entirely alien culture. Watanabe has always excelled at this perspective. That's how he can conceive of his Travis Bickle in ethnic knitwear, or a shearling-lined nylon jacket in a lustrous, positively glamorous purple. Weird, but also a little wonderful.
26 January 2006
Fed up with pretty, polite, ladylike retro? The young Japanese are. Junya Watanabe, like his compatriot Jun Takahashi of Undercover, is trying to beat a path forward by reverting to rock as a source of ideas. Heads bristling with massive spiked paper Mohawks, faces masked in cling film, his imaginary gang of psycho-punks stomped out in skinny cropped bondage pants, heavy skinhead boots, and skewed, cutaway, pulled-back versions of trenchcoats.Watanabe said he'd been inspired by a Japanese band that delights in the name Mad Capture Maggots. The results involved a lot of patching together of chopped-up tour T-shirts, ripped crochet leggings, distressed leather, and camouflage prints. Still, whatever's rocking Watanabe's world at the moment, he'll never make a totally convincing convert to street toughness. For all the full-on energy of this show, it somehow couldn't help but echo his sweet, career-long romance with traily long dresses and Edwardian frock coats—even if, this season, they're pretending to slam doors and sulk.
3 October 2005
The soundtrack of mid-period Led Zeppelin acoustic tracks suggested stadia full of Midwestern blue-collar boys with lighters aloft, and Junya Watanabe duly followed with his interpretation of the wardrobe said audience might have worn to work. Hence, a collection full of the patterns, fabrics, and detailing that have made Dickies and Pointer into American institutions, transmogrified here by a radically different design sensibility. While Issey, Yohji, et al. have long sold us on their version of Japanese peasant garb, Watanabe is coming at things from a 180-degree angle, detecting exoticism in the everyday outfits of (to him) alien Western culture.Janitors, carpenters, and kitchen staff across Middle America might have recognized familiar details—the pinstriped canvas, for instance, or the topstitching, or the hardy zippers—but they'd surely have been bemused by the proportions. Watanabe showed a long four-button jacket and a short, square-cut, boxy style over trousers that were leggings-tight or dropped-crotch generous. Fabrics were prosaic: canvas, denim, nylon, and pleather. Shoes were appropriately plain Jack Purcells. The designer has recently struck up a customizing relationship with Lacoste, so there were also polo shirts in pink, blue, and red, with the familiar alligator lodged high on the collarbone, or even somewhere over the shoulder. Arbitrary, but oddly charming.
5 July 2005
The communal delight that welled up at Junya Watanabe's show was a bit like the surge of elation that comes when the pieces of an impossible puzzle click together. How to make the heritage of haute couture relevant today? Where does Victoriana fit into that picture? And where have all the casual clothes gone? These questions have been swirling around Paris fashion like the sleet in the streets. And suddenly, they all settled into a moment of charming clarity under Watanabe's roof.Girls in tufted, rough-hewn Davy Crockett hats began walking out wearing full-skirt fifties dresses in mohair plaid—part prom, part rock 'n' roll. One had a black vinyl bodice, introducing the masterfully simple melding of old-world fabric and high-tech utility Watanabe calls "heavy-duty couture." The idea came together in a series of blousons and parkas in which an outer layer of tweed was fused onto a shiny synthetic inner shell. An absolutely practical padded checked brown tweed jacket, its generous collar lined in orange nylon, bubbled into a voluminous parallel of Cristobal Balenciaga's tailoring.Other pieces, bunched up below the waist with parachute ripcords to give a vague sense of the eighteenth century, moved toward the modernist romance that marks Watanabe's most inspired shows. Black high-neck, pie-frilled Victorian blouses and ruffle-sleeve jackets, worn with circle skirts (one padded like a nylon duvet), connected brilliantly with the sober, governessy silhouette that is cropping up as a new direction this week. Watanabe conflates all these complex influences into clothes that look current and simple to wear—and that's a stroke of genius.
4 March 2005
Last season Junya Watanabe dressed his men for rock climbing. This season he's equipped them to go way up above the snow line. One might reasonably assume he has a thing about mountains. Not so, he cheerfully declared after his latest show. "But I like snow."This collection might almost have been a joint effort with The North Face or Patagonia, so true to the spirit of the mountaineer was it. The boots, goggles, nylon puffers, and zipped, snapped pants would be perfect for the Zugspitze, but Watanabe also outfitted his intrepid crew to climb any urban peak. He rendered his fitted, hooded jackets and lean, cropped trousers in plaids, pinstripes, Prince of Wales checks, and mini houndstooths, combining the sporty and the dressy in a manner already familiar from the Milan men's shows. Lumberjack-plaid hoodies and an orange nylon duffel, meanwhile, invoked the punky brio of snowboarders. And Fair Isle sweaters and bobble hats added the folksy flourish for which Watanabe has such an affection.
28 January 2005
There was something deliberately rough-and-ready about the way Junya Watanabe knocked together raw-edged ruffled cotton blouses and peasant dirndls, and hammered on zippers and snaps in place of decoration in his spring collection. "Like the huts in Dover Street Market" was his gnomic explanation. That reference—if it helps—is to the shantytown shacks installed by Watanabe's mentor, Rei Kawakubo, in Comme des Garçons' new London department store.Though Watanabe might have been aiming at the impression of spontaneous, artistic use of humble materials, there was plenty of complexity—and an eye for current trends—to be found. The deeply encrusted gold zipper necklines and patches of silver snaps on vests and boleros were distant relatives of the widespread Asiatic folk-embroidery tribe. Long, gathered skirts, cream lace, and poet sleeves were perfectly in step with themes that are cropping up all over this season.What's particularly personal is Watanabe's romanticism, and his persistent use of those dippy frayed edges. Can't hold it against him, though: After all, this is the man who, two winters ago, originated ragged-edged tweed—a trend that went mega, at every possible level, this year. Not surprisingly, then, audiences tend to cling to Watanabe's every thread for novel ideas. Though this collection didn't wield the seismic potential of a few winters ago, it had a charm all its own.
4 October 2004
Having previously trained his well-developed sense of humor on iconic Americana like motorbike insignias, Levi's, and Hawaiian shirts, Junya Watanabe focused this season on the kind of people you might find spending the weekend in a national park: hikers and climbers. Serious climbers at that, kitted out with boots, ropes, and crampons. Watanabe's wit—and his ease with fashion avant-gardery—came into play via funny little punk details (bondage straps and what the British call bum flaps) and his unusual combinations of colors, patterns, and textures. Floral-print nylon would not necessarily be the first choice of fabric for someone about to scale a cliff face. But it suggested a cheerful utilitarianism (also present in a hibiscus-patterned shirt with utility-belt pockets) that made for an entirely charming, happy-hippie take on the great outdoors.
2 July 2004
Perhaps only Junya Watanabe (or his mentor, Rei Kawakubo) could cut an Edwardian gown out of what looks like a black nylon sleeping bag—and call it "classic." But if you're tuned in to Watanabe's romantic, avant-garde wavelength, with prior knowledge of his body of work, the idea actually made a kind of sense— eventually. During the show, his deeply padded stole necklines evolved into Poiret-like wraps and then on into sweet renditions of utilitarian, down-filled jackets. Classic couture meets classic streetwear, if you will.Watanabe also revisited his favorite personal classics—the tweed and denim he's worked to stellar effect in the past. He used micro-tweed in jackets with tiny accordion pleats circling sleeves and waist, and took the padding theme to the insides of a forties-style, turquoise and brown Donegal skirtsuit. His signature aged denims came cut into low-riding skirts and as a great pair of loose-fit jeans. Watanabe also developed this season's cape obsession, turning it into a fine layer of knitted lace, like a sophisticated version of a bed-jacket.In the end, this was not one of those vintage Watanabe collections that set copyists off on a new path for seasons to come; but his inventive touch had a quiet appeal nonetheless.
2 March 2004
Bold. Brilliant. For spring/summer, Junya Watanabe took us on a tour of the body, mapping out new territory on the torso, exploring new lines beneath the waist. As might be expected from the Comme des Garçons protégé, models resembled otherworldly creatures—all sporting identical high, sleek, black wigs and alabaster skin, the ideal canvas on which to build his layers of inventiveness.He started with a series of sporty, second-skin undergarments—cropped tanks and cycling shorts—beneath tailored jackets cut from whisker-fine polyester. But then Watanabe’s experiment truly began to develop. Layer by layer, piece by piece, the body was eventually camouflaged by squares and diamonds and dots that spiraled in ever more complex confections. There were white dots the circumference of espresso cups dancing across black dresses, and polka dots of all dimensions were sliced and scattered across fluid, paneled skirts. Sheer gray bird’s-eye check jackets clung to the ribs, their intricate seams tracing the bones beneath. (Diagrams should be offered to Watanabe-wearers, as the point of entry to some of these was hard to detect).The only respite from the stark black, white, and gray came in a single trapeze-shaped silky dress covered in diamonds of tan, chocolate, and cream. One could only wonder what this collection might have been had the designer indulged us with his kaleidoscopic sense of color. Maybe next season.
7 October 2003
Junya Watanabe’s beautiful Fall collection was every bit as romantic as the show’s venue, the Imperial ballroom at the InterContinental hotel, with its Grecian columns, painted cherubs and gildedboiserie.To the strains of cello concertos and lilting arias, models glided beneath the enormous chandeliers in awning-striped tea dresses, Peter Pan–collared jackets over flounced skirts and wasp-waisted tweed suits, trimmed with oversize bows. The silhouettes were right out of a Merchant Ivory period drama, but Watanabe would never be satisfied with interpreting any era so straightforwardly. The hems and sleeves were left raw and unraveling, and the rough, nubby tweeds and tartans were more Artful Dodger thanRoom with a View’s Lucy Honeychurch.Sweet femininity and innocence were the order of the day, however, played up via giant hairpieces, teased to resemble frilly, wide-brimmed Edwardian hats or cascading as floor-length Rapunzel tresses that masked both the models’ faces and what they were wearing. Watanabe threw in several amusing riffs on classic Chanel: Madame’s pearl chokers sewn onto sweaters, chain belts threaded through full skirts (the effect was more punk than haute bourgeois) and the whole idea of the proper tweed suit as a kind of social armor.Backstage after the show, Watanabe described the collection as “classic clothing interpreted in my own way.” And though it would be a stretch to call anything Watanabe does commercial, there were some very wearable pieces here. The slim dresses and flatteringly snug jackets, in particular, will surely be on many wish lists come September.
5 March 2003
Junya Watanabe’s show conjured a vision of innocent 18th-century milkmaids who had parachuted into a field of summer flowers. The girls seemed to have floated down from the sky under huge, airy umbrella hats, wearing drifty, white, flower-dotted prints suspended on webbing tape. Yes, webbing: in an original twist on this season’s ubiquitous combat trend, Watanabe made it look dreamily pretty. His prints, done in blue-and-white and rose-scattered fabrics, were made into cropped pants ruched into shorts and dresses hitched up at the hems. He also, thoughtfully, equipped his bucolic regiment with matching backpacks, some fused into the girls’ garments.Watanabe’s was one of the few collections this season with a light, fresh take on summer dressing. But the designer could have made his point more effectively by editing out some of the variations on his theme, especially those in black and garish ’70s prints.
2 October 2002
Junya Watanabe's audience descended into the perma-gloom of the Salle Wagram, a turn-of-the-century venue off the Champs Élysées. The former music hall proved the perfect setting for Watanabe's elegiac—though far from morbid—show.Watanabe's collection was composed almost entirely of dusty-gray '30s-styled dresses in satin, cotton and velvet, often bias cut and/or backless, and always in an artful state of distress. Hems were riddled with holes, as though the gray-lipsticked wearers had walked away from some disaster in their sturdy leather biker boots and crooked, incinerated Edwardian hats. The designer used patchworked textures of black, a minute sprinkle of silver beading on an embroidered dress, and a beautiful layering of black lace to veil a silver lining. Among the drifting horde of dresses were a couple of jackets, ridged with seaming in the technique Watanabe used for denim in his Spring show, and a stellar full-length raincoat full of drama and mystery.Watanabe, who said after the show that he "was feeling in the dark," may be reacting to the current state of the world. But he's a sensitive soul, more prone to bursts of cheerfulness than angst, and the collection came across as delicate and melancholy rather than doom-laden.
12 March 2002
Junya Watanabe’s Techno Couture collection followed on the heels of his acclaimed Function and Practicality show, which featured simulated rain that proved his transformable get-ups were, indeed waterproof. For Fall his focus shifted from water to air. Despite his play with volumes, Watanabe’s Fall collection is perhaps the most ethereal he has ever created.“One didn’t have to be a professional seamstress to understand the hard work that had been put into creating those large forms yet keeping the texture so delicate,” says model Vicky Andrén, 16 years after wearing them on the runway. “The outfits were perhaps not what I would be wearing on a daily basis.” She remembers them “mainly because the collection quite literally ‘stood out’ in such an extraordinary way.”At first glance, the honeycomb ruffs Junya Watanabe showed in his Fall 2000 Techno Couture collection called to mind those seen in Rembrandt portraits, but we’re guessing those starched confections couldn’t fold and be stored in an envelope, like Watanabe’s. They certainly weren’t made of a “techno” fabric like polyester chiffon, from which the designer created his up-to-date and exaggerated take on the ruff, transforming it from an accessory to a garment with an organic-meets-space-age aesthetic. The material might have been unknown in Rembrandt’s time, but its method of production—hand sewing—certainly was.
25 April 2016
Junya Watanabe’s collection was nothing short of an epiphany: one of those rare fashion moments when creative genius, artistic integrity, and down-to-earth sensibility come together as one. The show opened with two girls running down the rained-on runway, protected only by their dainty foulards and beautifully simple shift robes. Each took turns unfastening the seams on the sides and turning the front of her dress onto itself, revealing a different color and print—in fact, two looks in one. Blending function and delicate beauty was the leitmotiv for Watanabe’s entire presentation. There were waterproof skirts (equipped with a hidden protective plastic layer), wrap-around scarves that upon closer inspection proved to be attached to a dress or skirt, gloriously pleated wraps and futuristic headpieces. It was a seamless display of refinement, architectural construction and clarity of vision that relied on technologically advanced fabrics and techniques coupled with Watanabe’s impeccably pure sense of style.
4 October 1999