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.
