Outside the Junya Watanabe show this morning, the corner of the 9th arrondissement where it took place was busy with fans of the Japanese designer. Appearing in their new season Junya or their beloved vintage pieces, they pose for the street style photographers who set the alarm early to capture the unfolding scene. Passers-by on buses and on bicycles stare in amazement or take out their own cameras. Most other brands rely on PR and marketing teams for moments like this. It’s rare to inspire Watanabe’s dedication, and that’s because few other designers have managed to construct such a distinctive aesthetic.
Watanabe is a designer-historian, who uses references from leading talents of the past and co-opts subcultures from punk to new wave to create his sui generis creations. He is also one of the most enthusiastic collaborators in the industry, collaborating with brands across the fashion spectrum to put his collectible spin on wardrobe essentials. This was a collection in which he channeled his mathematician’s genius for combining geometric shapes with wearable sculpture.
The show opened with a trio of all-black pieces that looked more like cartoon explosions than clothing, made of triangles and tubes sticking out at all angles in a material that resembled fabric upholstery, needed to hold the extreme shapes. “Creating objects, not clothes” were the four words he gave in an email after the show. As the show progressed, Watanabe bent those tubes into less confrontational curved shapes, constructing 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 are made like origami, with architectural shoulders and ghost pleats crossing the front and back. From there, Watanabe switched to unrinsed dark denim and stitched it like fractals or the facets of a diamond. He may be the first designer ever to make jeans with fanny packs. Next came tweed bouclé, a nod to one of the leading talents of the past, but deconstructed and reassembled as only Watanabe can. These were clothes, not objects. With their dangling appendages, they were strikingly strange. Just the way his fans like them.
