Junya Watanabe’s Silver Swagger menswear show was a superlative celebration of middle-aged and senior manhood; an inspirational beacon of cool realness—whoever said that to be good-looking you have to be young? Watanabe got hopes up, as Steff Yotka put it her Vogue think piece, around the need for MILF representation on runways. Yet disappointingly, he proved not to be the man to follow through with projecting age parity on the women’s side of his business. Rather, the absolute opposite: Watanabe called his collection Kawaii, after the Japanese cult of sugar-sweet cartoon girly-ness.
Granted, the pairs of young models who proceeded out in wigs tied up in infantile bunches didn’t look all that cutesy on second glance. Their fake eyelashes were askew, their pink lipstick was laid on too thickly, like dolls that had been played with by a child. Once you started noticing that, you also noticed the puzzling fact that there wasn’t an Asian face included in the casting. That’s odd, when you think about it, from a designer who works in a company owned by arguably the greatest Japanese leader in global fashion, the legendary 76-year old female designer Rei Kawakubo. (There weren’t any Asian men in the January show either.)
But to the clothes: Maybe there were intended ironies coded into the chopped-up flower prints, which were reassembled as grunge patchworks and worn over jeans with either spiked biker boots or (the best thing) fancy silver leather–trimmed suede Western boots. The collection continued in the collaged style of joining one part of a familiar utilitarian garment with another. By now, this is a familiar Watanabe practice (in his menswear collections he does it with lists of collaborating brands); one he’s developed in step with what Chitose Abe (another ex-Comme des Garçons designer) has made so successful in her Sacai women’s collection.
This is not intended to roast the content of Watanabe’s women’s collection—it was full of comfortable and utilitarian clothes that possess the rare, inherent quality of having nothing difficult about them. The irony is that Watanabe designs collections that are identified with and worn by women of all ages and sizes from multiple backgrounds, around the world. Would that he took the next step and welcomed their representatives onto his runway, as he did with his male audience. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, as the British saying goes.
