Junya Watanabe has always been fluent in the language of street style: His consistently brilliant chopped-up and redone jeans, motorcycle jackets, and army surplus are avidly-amassed wardrobe trophies for his followers. Strangely, though, so little is known about this very private Japanese designer that it’s easy to project onto him the persona of a recluse who works in isolation in Tokyo, while perhaps enjoying solving geometry equations on the side. With his spring collection, it became apparent that the hermit-like suppositions might not be true—because Watanabe hung out in Berlin before coming up with the powerful meld of street-tribe clothes and spiky 3D geometry he put out today.
Well, there’s no better city to immerse yourself in every shade of underground and alternative culture: punk, goth, skater, biker, neo-hippy, whatever. Low-cost and liberal, Berlin is Europe’s magnet for all of that. But the city’s streetwear sources alone weren’t enough for Watanabe. Neither, upon reflection, was the extended exercise in origami that he showed last season. Instead, Watanabe combined them all—or so an email from his publicist suggested: “Neither extreme construction nor streetwear stand alone stylistically. They are complementary and when merged together, become stronger.”
So we got the two sides of Watanabe’s interests, brought together in a show that was incredibly dense with product to buy: everything from German-slogan band T-shirts and patchwork skater pants to shredded jeans and micro-floral vintage look dresses, white lace skirts, soccer shirts, and even trenchcoats. Watanabe’s 3D overlayers of crenellated, cyber-punkish black nylon made far more sense against all that—perhaps relating more to the virtual fantasies of gamers and cosplayers than to the realms of inertly conceptual experimental fashion. Bottom line: As curious as this may be to assert, Junya Watanabe is to Japanese design what Hedi Slimane was at Saint Laurent—though, of course, much more discreet.
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