Outside the Junya Watanabe show this morning, the 9th arrondissement corner where it took place was thick with the Japanese designer’s fans. They turn up in their new-season Junya or treasured vintage pieces and pose for the street style photographers who set their alarms early to document the unfolding scene. The passersby in buses and on bikes stare agog or pull out cameras of their own. Most other brands have to rely on PR and marketing teams to manufacture these kinds of moments. It’s rare to inspire the devotion that Watanabe does, and that’s because few other designers have been able to construct such a distinctive aesthetic.
Watanabe is a designer-historian, lifting references from leading talents of the past and co-opting subcultures from punk to new wave to craft his sui generis creations. He’s also one of the industry’s most enthusiastic collaborators, teaming up with brands all over the fashion spectrum to put his collectible spin on wardrobe essentials. This was a collection where he channeled his mathematician’s genius for combining geometric shapes with wearable sculptures.
The show began with a trio of all-black pieces more like cartoon explosions than clothing, made from triangles and tubes jutting out at all angles in a material that looked close to fabric upholstery, necessary to hold the extreme shapes. “Creating objects, not clothes” was the four-word précis he gave in a postshow email. As the show progressed, Watanabe bent those tubes into less confrontational curved shapes and constructed 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 were constructed like origami, with architectural shoulders and ghost folds crisscrossing the front and back. From there, Watanabe shifted into unrinsed dark denim, stitching it like fractals or the facets of a diamond. He might be the first designer ever to make jeans with hip panniers. Next came tweed bouclé, a nod to one of those leading talents of the past, but deconstructed and put back together again as only Watanabe can do. These were clothes, not objects. With their dangling appendages they were eye-catchingly strange. Just the way his fans like them.
