The cooling of the “ordinary” has been one of the threads running through the menswear collections. Whether it’s labeled normcore or dadcore or just back-to-basics, perhaps the underlying cause is fashion’s uneasy feeling that it ought to make itself seem less like a frivolous inessential when times are tough. Well, if the call is for durable functional garments that somehow sidestep fashion, then Junya Watanabe is the designer with the ultimate authority in the field. He’s been building respectful two-way relationships with admired “authentic” menswear manufacturers since long before the term collaboration became commonplace. His Spring collection was a masterful contribution to the “real” conversation, or “the legit way to wear workwear,” as he put it, in a show note.
There were 48 jackets, trousers, coats, and T-shirts made in collaboration with Carhartt, some jeans produced with Levi’s, and anoraks brilliantly patchworked together from cut-up backpacks and hiking jackets by The North Face and Karrimor. Watanabe has an ineffably subtle hand when jigsawing things together. Even when a pair of jeans might have zones of ticking stripes, leather, and corduroy, they still manage to come out looking pressed and sensible rather than an overcomplicated, try-hard fashion item.
A lot of this was down to Watanabe’s casting. The men who carried off this collection were individuals who looked as if they were part of the real world. Watching them walk out, in their different ages, ethnicities, builds, and beards, was a shockingly unusual sensation. In some ways, it felt not unlike the emotional impact of Dries Van Noten’s gathering of his former models at his last womenswear show. In this case, though, it wasn’t just the rarity of seeing more mature people represented on the runway that was stirring. It was the dependable, skilled, down-to-earth look of the adults Watanabe was depicting. Somehow, they looked like the sort of men who can be trusted to calmly fix things in the world, a completely different language of clothing and values from that of the besuited corporate titans, bankers, and politicians who messed it all up in the first place.
