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.
