“There’s a golden era of men’s clothing, fashion type of clothing, to my mind. And it’s, say, 1958 to 1962. Then there is no rock ’n’ roll: there is no Beatles. Then, every person from Jackson Pollock to Miles Davis to Allen Ginsberg to Andy Warhol to John F. Kennedy to Miki Dora wore Ivy League clothes, sliced and diced. Men could only draw from that Ivy League bag of clothing. But everyone put their own stamp on it. This was the zenith, for me: pre rock ’n’ roll.”
Those words weren’t said today by Junya Watanabe: regrettably, he wasn’t available for interviews. They were said to me by Shawn Stüssy (of whom more later) back in a 2018 interview we did for L’Uomo Vogue. But this show brought them to mind when the sight of look 23 collided with the sound of Miles Davis’s “My Funny Valentine” over the PA. The look consisted of a gold buttoned blue blazer in a single breasted ‘sack’ shape and a pair of straight leg khaki chinos, worn with polished oxford shoes and a shirt and tie. This pretty accurate reproduction of a canonical Ivy ensemble (also memorably riffed upon at Polo this season) came with an added menswear semantic: embroidered into the chino pants was the unmistakable broken crown graphic (a riff on Rolex) and 8 ball designed by Shawn Stüssy.
Stüssy’s words, quoted above, seem to me a compelling source theory of modern Western menswear. They suggest that the middle of the last century was a fulcrum moment at which multiple typologies of man co-existed within the same core post-war uniform. Rock ’n’ roll—real, early rock ’n’ roll—was the moment of rupture that created the concept of the teenager and birthed the endless generational pendulum swing of subcultural splintering (each generating its own style subset) that has followed ever since.
It’s amazing where one look can take you. Watanabe’s 23rd today was, of course, a collaboration with Stüssy, the company Shawn Stüssy founded first as a surfboard shaping business back in the early 1980s from his garage, and which he exited in 1996 when annual sales had reached around $35 million. Key factors in his move into fashion, where he effectively created the template for contemporary streetwear, included his early trips to Japan, where he first encountered the work of Yohji Yamamoto and Watanabe’s CdG group colleague, Rei Kawakubo: things come in waves.
The rest of this collection was a lovingly expert and jazz-structured look at many of the waves that have washed across menswear during the last gasp of the 19th century, across the 20th, and into the 21st. Hats sometimes acted as an imaginative timestamp of the period archetypes Watanabe was playing upon as he brought in further collaborations with manufacturers including Levi’s and Spiewak. The designer worked fracture into paradigms with patchworks and hybridization, all to the sound of Davis and Cannonball Adderley inserting their gorgeous spontaneous melodies into standards from the Great American Songbook. The Village Vanguard-style jazz club set was a wonderful touch: we were watching one of menswear’s greatest soloists riffing with freedom, invention, and deep knowledge.
