Junya Watanabe has always had youth culture in his blood. It’s essential to his brand. In an unusually self-revelatory mood this season, he ensured that an email reached his reviewers, explaining that his first collection was made from ripped-up sofa fabric, old curtains, and men’s tweed coats he’d found at flea markets in London. At a wild guess, that formative trip must have been at a time when punks still paraded tartan, cheap leopard spots, and ripped fishnets in the King’s Road around Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s shop, Sex. Punk broke out in the mid-1970s and continued amongst the hardcore few into the early 1980s, which would have made Watanabe somewhere in his late teens to early twenties at the time (he was born in 1961 and was possibly still a student at Bunka Fashion College).
Anyway, punk is a classic style now, and Watanabe is an Anglophile. He chose to revisit his nostalgia for it and reuse some of the fabrics he started with. The music, though, was from the earlier doyennes of glam rock, with Marc Bolan of T.Rex singing, “But you won’t fool the children of the revolution,” as girls with crazy-colored, partly-shaved hair stomped by looking like not-quite-right fusions of Ziggy Stardust and Soo Catwoman. Was it imagination, or did some of Watanabe’s pleather circular-cutout jackets look like smashed vinyl records?
The collection was a “medley,” as he put it: the punkish staples on one side and his geometric three-cutting obsession on the other. Midway (and it was a long show), there was a superb moment when he began pleating and draping the tartan into short, toga-like shapes. Following that came the furnishing fabric. Heavy-duty curtain brocade was worked into the body of a biker jacket and worn over a gold Lurex sweater and swingy Stewart tartan skirt. A beige trench coat had sleeves covered in chintzy fabric patchwork. All of the above were the epitome of the kind of things Junya Watanabe fans crave to find in stores, whatever the season.