Graphic girls as living dolls and clothes as performance as opposed to clothes for performance: This was what could be found in Junya Watanabe's latest collection for Spring. There were certainly no heavily researched breathable fibers, just lots of warm leatherette (especially appropriate in a Grace Jones à la Jean-Paul Goude way) alongside PVC, Perspex, and the occasional jolt of tulle…oh, and rubber swimming caps.
Here, a yearning for the certainties/uncertainties of an early 20th-century avant-garde past seemed apparent—as it has for a fair few designers this season. In Watanabe's case, there seemed to be an echoing of Robert and Sonia Delaunay's Orphism—particularly Sonia's performance-based pieces and a synthesis of her and her circle's fashion work that emerged after the Great War—Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russe in its various influential forms, and Hugo Ball's Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire that began in 1916. In short, if you were looking to Watanabe for a nice pair of patchwork jeans for Spring, forget it.
Instead, Watanabe's "patchwork madness" collection of last season—which had already begun the process of morphing into something much more abstract in many of its circular shapes, volumes, and constructions—was here turned into "graphic marching." Those are the latest defining words of the designer.
In many ways, that idea of graphic marching ties in with the thought of the "machine-age" woman of the first half of the last century—and here she was almost like the literal incarnation of the poster girl, wearing flattened vinyl circular forms and experimental compositions, marching ever forward. But what can't be ignored in this collection, either, is the pop synthesis that conflates different periods of time. Close up, there was as much Michael Alig-style '90s club kid in there as there was Cocteau and Satie's Cubist ballet, Parade. Not to mention Rei Kawakubo's "flat" collection for Comme des Garçons for Fall 2012 and Watanabe's own history of formal experiments in pleating or his love of Breton stripes. And certainly, if we are talking about graphic girls as living dolls and clothing as performance, the street-style contingent cannot be ignored—they will lap up this collection, tailor made as it is to turn them into living tear sheets. And in this way, what Watanabe did today was as much 2014 as 1914, 1994, or 1984, and it both comments on and furthers the graphic march of people as corporeal Tumblrs. God help us.
