Undercover (Q7560)
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Undercover is a fashion house from BOF.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Undercover |
Undercover is a fashion house from BOF. |
Statements
Very refined bondage plus a vegan breakfast buffet made for a healthy start at this morning’s Undercover womenswear presentation. It was held at Dover Street Market Paris. We filed through the courtyard, past the chair avalanche installation by Tadashi Kawamata, and headed downstairs. Once there, we were greeted with a group of recognizably quotidian garments arranged on mannequins. There was a white hoodie worn with black leather leggings. A red knit polo shirt with matching five-pocket pants. A white T-shirt dress. A khaki cardigan. A white tailored blazer with a matching skirt. A biker jacket (naturally). And a long black tailored coatdress.You noticed that the lifeless figures were wearing the same lace collars and metal leaf or nail headpieces last seen at June’s menswearshow. Some wore new accessories: gauze chokers embroidered with the words “Kosmik Witch.” Yet the most striking details lay within those aforementioned garments—banks of parallel golden zippers set in leather strips and linked by more leather lacing, or sections of metal-buckled strapping that contained and defined.Jun Takahashi was on hand, via translator, to outline. The translator summated: “The core of Undercover design is usually putting some of his unique taste into daily clothes…adding some fetishness and being able to adjust the size and the silhouette can make daily clothes sexier and also more elegant.” Punk is one of Takahashi’s foundational influences, and the worn mechanisms of restraint and control are key to that subculture’s fashion tradition. Here, he was applying them to some strikingly mainstream templates in order to make the safe suddenly, exhilaratingly dangerous.In the next room was that breakfast buffet, which was receiving a thorough review from early arrivals. Alongside it was a section of nonbondage outfits that used needle-punching to blur the gradient sections of washed color in the looks. These were more womenswear cousins to the menswear that had shown in June, in that they were based around artist Robert Bosisio’s nebulous dimensional canvases. Finally, we came to a room in which were arranged four dresses, in pink, white, black, and a lemon print on black. These had finlike frilled necklines and hems, between which ran silhouette-defining sections of more strapping or zippers and lacing. They were worn by lace-masked and metal-garlanded models who twirled effortlessly on rotating platforms: pretty and severe.
The now-revived Undercover policy is to have one show a season and throw a presentation for whichever gender’s collection doesn’t make the runway that time round. Today’s format, especially with the designer present, was as stimulating to sample as the no-egg egg sandwich at the buffet. It was infinitely more interesting and engaging than having only the look book in hand. And it allowed for a final question: What is Takahashi’s daily fetish? The designer smiled under his hat, then delivered the answer to this one himself: “A secret!”
29 September 2024
When it comes to pre-collections, Jun Takahashi is not a man of many words. If his runways are emotional and overflowing with narratives that invite a myriad of interpretations, the lookbooks for his off-seasons come with little or no explanations. These clothes are less experimental and more grounded in daily life. The message seems to be: If the runways are meant to make you daydream, the pre-collections offer what you’ll be wearing while doing so.This time around though Takahashi did send an email: “We aimed to create daily wear that is relaxed yet incorporates Undercover’s signature techniques throughout.” When prompted about the similarities between this collection and his knockout fall ready-to-wear show—with its flattened trompe l’oeil day-to-day uniforms and windswept layers—he added: “In recent seasons, a core concept has been to incorporate Undercover’s distinct style into wearable designs. This was true for the previous fall/winter collection and continues into this pre-collection.”Here, Takahashi expanded that fall trompe l’oeil concept with t-shirts hemmed with the top half of jeans and jackets ending in pleated panels evocative of skirts, demystifying his runway story by making it simpler and more wearable without doing away with its charm. He also slashed and paneled the shoulders and sides of sweatshirts and midi skirts, respectively, to insert evening-like drapes and volumes in everyday daywear styles. Pleating was a key element on everything from cardigans and shirting to trousers and t-shirt dresses. “The key point is that by incorporating feminine pleats and gathers into masculine tailoring, it creates a genderless aesthetic,” said Takahashi. It also adds a layer of oomph to the most ordinary of clothing, something few designers do with more aplomb than Takahashi.Elsewhere, Takahashi split open the backs of jackets, hoodies, and button-downs and tied the loose ends together. The results are playfully aerodynamic and decisively straightforward. There’s no need for hefty concepts and lofty explanations when clothes are made with their wearers in mind. This fashion speaks for itself.
15 July 2024
Since his spring 2024 ready-to-wear show, Jun Takahashi has imbued a refreshing sense of lightness into his womenswear. There’s been sheer layering, billowing volumes, unlined tailoring, and outfits flattened into roomy dresses. It’s as if Takahashi has been purging his line of the superfluous, but without doing away with his delicate magpie eye for ornamentation.Last month, Undercover menswear returned to the runway for the first time since January of 2020. Backstage, through a translator, Takhashi spoke of his ideals of a borderless world and how his collection manifested that thought by melding together a variety of “tribe” signifiers. The headline, however, was how weightless the collection looked as it walked down the runway. It was boneless, the whole thing, but most memorably the tailoring. That concept of invertebrate construction carried over into this resort menswear lineup with back and side vents in jackets, wide-gauge knits, and stiff yet spacious fabrications. Briefly commenting on the collection via email, Takahashi said that the intention of these construction features was to make his clothes lighter and more dynamic, but that he still employed “rough-textured” fabrics rather than anything with too “gentle” of a feel.Takahashi had another thing on his mind, as well. He explained that he wanted to express the spirit of punk. The patches, graphics, and studs are the most literal evidence of its influence on the lineup, yet most punk of it all perhaps is Takahashi’s commitment to ease.
15 July 2024
“There are many categories, many tribes. I wanted to make it borderless. Because to eliminate conflicts, you want borders to be eliminated—that’s the metaphor. And because I work in fashion, this is how I can express that.” These words might not be precisely as Jun Takahashi said them post-show this afternoon; they’re more a paraphrased collage of his answers delivered via translator. However, they communicate the essential thrust behind an Undercover show that was the latest to approach what is fast emerging as a broader theme of this season: human unity at a moment of fracture.Before the first look, the show was intro’d with the opening section of a just-filmed live studio performance by the band Glass Beams. Takahashi said he’d first encountered the Melbourne, Australia-based trio on YouTube: inflected in part by founder Rajan Silva’s Indian heritage, it specializes in a lyric-less, tautly meandering, sort-of psychedelic prog-funk world music. All its members perform in jeweled masks.The closing section featured prints of Takahashi’s painted art whose subjects included a looming sphere-headed, many-tentacled entity that seemed vaguely H.G. Wells, and which the designer called “my creature.” In the opening section Takahashi seemed to consider the artist’s uniform, showing a series of loose linen jackets and high-hemmed pants in sky-blue, pink, or off-white. Straps were suspended from the jacket skirts, and the elbows, vents, and other points of physical articulation were bordered by zippers or slits. Some of the garments were printed with images of clouds, or smoke, and what looked like the house from Hitchcock’sPsycho.On their heads, the models wore either wide-brimmed hats with fishnet veils or headpieces of golden nails or leaves above lace masks across their eyes. Most wore ornate beaded collars at their necks and intriguing little details including brightly colored and oddly placed painted buttons. Later on there was a ragged-edged skirt in what looked like an old baroque or central Asian brocade, and another in a weathered gray windowpane check under what evoked a chain-seamed Chanel jacket in a tonal black patterned jacquard. Full-length robes and trailing, metal-flecked sari-esque trains and skirts came at the end. “He wanted to provide a men’s collection which also has elements that are feminine,” reported Takahashi’s translator: “because he thinks this border is getting less and less.
”She cited the designer as referencing West Asian and Middle Eastern source material. The Champion collaboration pieces in jersey were paradigms of occidental attire. You could likely spend a chunk of time Google Lensing these collection images to much more comprehensively annotate Takahashi’s layering of cultural fabrics. But the point apparently implied by the prints of Italian artist Robert Bosisio’s paintings of nebulous, aura-like subjects that looked most like clouds was that we all live under the same sky. A work of imaginative nomadism, this collection blended a utopian confederation of globally gathered ingredients to envisage a wearable world music.
19 June 2024
Sometimes a show just hits, and this Undercover show hit deeply. Jun Takahashi is one of fashion’s most sensitive designers, a quality he made vividly clear last season with a collection about personal grief. “He feels like he’s stuck in the world, but he wants to release himself,” his interpreter said at the time. This season he explained he was thinking about everyday life—the preciousness of the commonplace and the value of ritual.The change of heart came down to a movie. Backstage he asked the crowd of reporters if we’d seenPerfect Days, a new film from Wim Wenders about a Tokyo toilet cleaner named Hirayama who’s remarkably sanguine about life—finding beauty in his books, the tapes he plays on his commute, and the photos he takes of trees in parks. “Next time is next time, now is now,” he counsels his niece in a preview I found on YouTube. Takahashi was so moved he asked Wenders (who made a cameo on Yohji Yamamoto’s men’s runway last month) to write and read a poem for his soundtrack about a woman not unlike Hirayama in her approach to life.“Watching a Working Woman” paints a picture of a single mother, 40-years-old, with a job in a law firm, and a young son she likes to go to the movies with. After she puts him to bed, she writes letters and reads Raymond Chandler. What made it so resonant and affecting was its relatability; this wasn’t a fashion designer concocting some fantasy woman, with an improbable wardrobe to match, but rather someone with a human-sized (maybe even humble by some standards) life who is happy. Actually, it’s something to aspire to.Likewise for the clothes. The show opened with what looked like a white tank top and a pair of jeans; in fact, it was a jumpsuit with ribbed knit spliced into the pants’ side seams that matched the sweater the model carried in her hand. The quotidian made unique. To follow, there were many more reworkings of “everyday” garments—a cardigan, a gray marl sweatshirt, and more formal tailoring—to which he bonded swatches of excess fabric (wispy chiffon, metallic tinsel, a shaggy mohair), rendering them anything but ordinary or prosaic.The squares of material had a flattening effect, some pieces looked more 2-D than they would’ve without the bonding. There’s a metaphor about feeling stretched thin in there, as a single working mom probably does most of the time. But look again, and the trailing fabrics on the three closing outfits were more or less trains, and the models who wore them were regal.
Takahashi’s message: there are ups and downs, but each kind of day is important. Such earnestness is rare in fashion, which may be another reason it felt so right to see and hear it.
28 February 2024
In the wake of the contemplative transparencies and flower terrarium dresses that made the Undercover spring ’24 show so wistful and wondrous, this pre-collection delivered a surprisingly solid array of everyday attire. Granted, garments designed by Jun Takahashi are never ordinary, as evidenced by the cool jeans with flounced edges and blazers cut with a distinct hourglass shape.With Takahashi remaining in Tokyo and in the absence of any leads from a showroom team, the collection seemed less about storytelling than stylistic explorations: trenches deeply sliced and vented; Undercover collegiate jerseys spliced with blouses; trousers with trompe l’œil double hems; and hoodies in the supplest leather. The reappearance of shawl collars where they wouldn’t usually be found—on cardigans and down jackets projected pleasing polish. A fellow editor browsing the racks noted that the latter in ivory would be especially chic for a winter wedding. Earthy and brighter colors were layered as though sampled from a springtime garden while a most unusual print depicted beheaded teddy bears amidst bucolic landscapes. In Takahashi’s world, macabre and tender can easily co-exist.And although this collection felt a world away from the runway, the lookbook presented the lineup in front of poetic floral backdrops. These blooms were so enlarged that the models were scaled down to butterfly size—as though Takahashi had released them from the terrariums where they landed on solid ground. Here, the fluttery ruffles around the shoulder of a sweater or along the sleeves of an MA-1 jacket (the inner bright orange redefining the silhouette) played like hybrid nods to nature where creation flourishes in all forms.
31 January 2024
In the wake of the contemplative transparencies and flower terrarium dresses that made the Undercover spring ’24 show so wistful and wondrous, this pre-collection delivered a surprisingly solid array of everyday attire. Granted, garments designed by Jun Takahashi are never ordinary, as evidenced by the cool jeans with flounced edges and blazers cut with a distinct hourglass shape.With Takahashi remaining in Tokyo and in the absence of any leads from a showroom team, the collection seemed less about storytelling than stylistic explorations: trenches deeply sliced and vented; Undercover collegiate jerseys spliced with blouses; trousers with trompe l’œil double hems; and hoodies in the supplest leather. The reappearance of shawl collars where they wouldn’t usually be found—on cardigans and down jackets projected pleasing polish. A fellow editor browsing the racks noted that the latter in ivory would be especially chic for a winter wedding. Earthy and brighter colors were layered as though sampled from a springtime garden while a most unusual print depicted beheaded teddy bears amidst bucolic landscapes. In Takahashi’s world, macabre and tender can easily co-exist.And although this collection felt a world away from the runway, the lookbook presented the lineup in front of poetic floral backdrops. These blooms were so enlarged that the models were scaled down to butterfly size—as though Takahashi had released them from the terrariums where they landed on solid ground. Here, the fluttery ruffles around the shoulder of a sweater or along the sleeves of an MA-1 jacket (the inner bright orange redefining the silhouette) played like hybrid nods to nature where creation flourishes in all forms.
31 January 2024
It shouldn’t be surprising that Jun Takahashi is aTwin Peaksaficionado. There are any number of parallels between the designer’s embrace of strangeness and the unsettling series by David Lynch that has stood the test of time. With official authorization, this collection made use of title graphics, a series of stills from key moments—some color filtered—and other symbols such as the Double R Diner. The clothes checked every wearable box: outer layers that could withstand the Northwest weather; casual athletic pieces in burgundy and forest green; gray suits that riffed on roomy ‘90s silhouettes. Notably the images were not screen prints but rather jacquards, meaning that they were embedded within actual fabric and then patched onto the clothes—a more complicated process attesting to Takahashi’s technique-based approach.Elsewhere, with Angelo Badalamenti’s score from the series wafting through the showroom, embroideries of mini crosses floated across chinos and shirts, scattered here and there or in larger clusters. Plaids were enlarged and interpreted in streetwear and workwear shapes, while Takahashi’s doodles ended up on shirts and a down coat. Two characters faced each other with speech bubbles. “Can I ask something?” said one. “No,” said the other. A conversation killer becomes a conversation starter.This collection’s title, Wonderful and Strange, came courtesy of a quote from Agent Cooper: “I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.” One can only guess what the director will make of the collection, while everyone else will need to determine whether they are comfortable being out in the world wearing jackets emblazoned with Cooper smoking a cigarette or Laura Palmer’s postmortem face. But in these uncertain times, perhaps dressing through a Lynchian lens becomes a kind of mordant defense.
21 January 2024
When the lights went black at Undercover, we waited for the usual procession that signifies a show’s finale. It didn’t come. Instead three models materialized out of the darkness wearing strapless dresses whose skirts seemed to light up. From a distance they looked like movie projections, but as they approached it became clear the skirts were glowing from within. Moving closer still, you saw the colorful flowers, and, wait, was that a butterfly flitting around? Why, yes, it was.Jun Takahashi is one of fashion’s most inventive designers, but the terrarium dresses were a new level of ingenious, a technical feat as well as an emotionally resonant one. Through an interpreter backstage, Takahashi shared that he was grieving for people he was close to. “He feels like he’s stuck in the world, but he wants to release himself.” The butterflies, the interpreter made sure to add, “will be freed, of course.”Reckoning with mortality was an undercurrent of Takahashi’s show last season as well. It’s said that grief doesn’t end, it only changes. That it can produce powerful work was proved today. This was Takahashi at his most focused: The leitmotif that carried from the first suit to the final terrarium dress was transparent veiling or shrouding. To start, he showed neat tailoring, the sheer materials exposing the inner construction and the items he slipped between the front and back sides, like playing cards, straight razors, and silk flowers. On a camel trench the outer layer encased a set of feathered wings—the soundtrack was lifted fromWings of Desire, the Wim Wenders film about angels on the lookout for humans in distress.Later on came more formal suits, not see-through but swathed in more black georgette. They were as elegant as any tailoring anywhere this season, but Takahashi isn’t someone who seems to look around at what his peers are doing; for one thing, he’s too busy. Three of the looks here reproduced portraits from his first-ever oil painting exhibition,“They See More Than You Can See,”held in Tokyo earlier this month. Like the figures on his canvases, the faces on the deeply ruffled skirts had their eyes deleted, or disappeared, an eerie effect that was echoed in the other figurative pieces, which reproduced the surreally beautiful paintings of the German artist Neo Rauch. At his art show in Tokyo, Takahashi said “painting is more personal,” but we beg to differ. This was a deeply personal show and it was a spellbinder.
27 September 2023
These photos came with a single quote from the brand: “Undercover returns to the brand’s roots with Pre-Collection. With a focus on developing ‘Undercover-esque’ looks, overarching seasonal themes are replaced in favor of contemporary wear for everyday life.” No further explanation is needed, or at least that’s the suggestion.For his resort men’s lineup, Jun Takahashi kept that promise: There are no complex themes, no particular fanfare. But even at his most stripped down and commercial he remains a deeply compelling designer. A classic Canadian tuxedo has tiny embroidered spiders crawling all over it, varsity jackets and tailored coats are made in sheer vinyls, and hoodies are hybridized with cardigans and t-shirts. Even the most casual and basic of items—t-shirts and oxfords—are sliced apart and put back together with Frankenstein-esque seams. Think of them as bite-sized snacks, both for Undercover fans and for those in need of an unchallenging introduction—all the classics are here, waiting to be turned into a wardrobe.
27 July 2023