Junya Watanabe's theme was "Faraway." Nowhere specific, but the collaborator on this collection was Vlisco, the Dutch company that has been the major supplier of fabric to West and Central Africa since the mid-19th century, so Watanabe's destination wasn't really so vague. And he clarified it further with the accessories—beads, bones, fetish objects—he collected from a couple of Parisian stores that specialize in African artifacts. Without knowing that Vlisco is considered instrumental in helping to shape the region's cultural identity (for example, British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare uses the company's fabrics in his work to challenge Western colonial history), it was not hard to see how Watanabe's presentation of pallid Europeans in patchworked Africana might spark some knee-jerk negativism. But these eyes, at least, were reminded of the designer's work with boro, the traditional Japanese patchwork that began centuries ago as peasant clothing. There is a belief in Japan that when something has been damaged and mended, it becomes more beautiful.
And there was certainly beauty in Watanabe's collection. Everything was infected in some way with pattern and color, here as naive as a children's book illustration, there as geometric as an array of Cubist forms. Nothing was sacred, not a Breton stripe, not a double-breasted suit in a navy shadow plaid, not a Bermuda short, nor Watanabe's signature inside-out pieces. The patchwork gave each outfit a strong character; the tribal add-ons compounded it. With panama hats, bow ties, and sockless brogues, the models might have been Dutch businessmen adrift on the equator, their work long finished, their compass bearings lost, their own world slowly merging with the environment in which they found themselves. A man out of a Werner Herzog film, in fact. Where was Klaus Kinski when you needed him?
Something else occurred while the parade of boned, beaded, bangled wannabe witchdoctors trailed past. With the patchwork and the extraordinary accessories, it was almost as though Watanabe was turning the models themselves into fetish objects, the focus of a new kind of cargo cult. And, with its irrational worship of the object, isn't that just what fashion is?
