The theme from the ’60s sci-fi puppet show Thunderbirds made everyone sit up and smile as Junya Watanabe’s models emerged onto the runway from a M*A*S*H-type army tent pitched in the super-minimal conservatory of the Parc Citroën. Watanabe’s sense of humor and hidden commentaries on the state of the world are aspects of his character that are irresistible to project onto him—he doesn’t go in for explanations—but this time his backstage word was that he’d been thinking about “the innocent childhood sensibility of obsessing over heroes and hobbies.” Boys playing at soldiers, then. It was an ingenious way of falling in with today’s march of military and utility staples, which are universal constants all over menswear.
As fashion’s collaborator-in-chief, Watanabe is better than anyone at patrolling the frontier between the authentic and designer fashion. This season, he’d joined up with Ark Air, producers of high-performance fabric and garments that see action with such outfits as the British Royal Marines and special forces, and the French Foreign Legion. Hence the real-deal camouflage deployed in trousers, shorts, and jackets, and embedded in lots of hybrid patchworks throughout. (Apologies for the puns; the ease with which military metaphors march in lockstep with men’s fashion is telling in itself.)
The references to army and navy surplus kept swinging out to the bracing accompaniment of army band music—at one point, the “Colonel Bogey March.” It provided a full parade of super-wearable uniform items that have been co-opted into the language of menswear, with a genius focus on the current fashion obsession with all manner of strap-on pocketed kit. Flak vests, harnesses with multiple pouches, holster bags, fanny packs, and backpacks worn across the chest for personal security: All these were present and correct, just as so many had been in Virgil Abloh’s debut at Vuitton yesterday.
A perfectly on-point real-wear collection for the man who wants to be in-the-know fashionable but also camouflage himself as a civilian? That’s Watanabe’s unique attraction in a nutshell.
There’s something else that shouldn’t go unrecorded in this dispatch, though. You want to think about the fact that these boys were all of an age to join up, as opposed to Watanabe’s sometime choice of Dad-gen men. Watanabe is a pacifist who has shown as much in many of his tender, moving collections for women. In a fraught age when so many designers are talking about peace, love, and understanding, was there a comment here on the incorrigible masculine urge to fight—and the early-years of gendered play-conditioning that encourages it? Maybe, maybe not. Then again, Watanabe did break in with a rare interjection in the backstage debrief. “International Rescue,” he said. On the side of the good guys, then.
