Junya Watanabe is always at his brilliant, refreshing best when he’s in a romantic mood—or when he trains his brain on investigating some sort of generic piece of clothing. A happy morning for fashion, then, when his two strengths came together in a collection about denim intersecting with the processes of dressmaking. Or, as his team translated afterward, “A romantic feeling in rock music.” Ah, yes: Another thing about Watanabe is that he’s a music buff.
Maybe he was listening to Queen or Strike Back (a French neo-rock band, he said—there were a couple of tour tees in the show) as he got on with chopping up acres of different kinds of denim as he riffed away on crinolines, bias-cut dresses, and lingerie. Anyway, he was clearly in a good mood when he was at it, happily experimenting in his own productive groove, sans angst or any overtly intellectual messaging.
Funny, though: In dissecting the templates of Old World haute couture and patch-working them into the eternal signifier of youth and streetwear, Watanabe’s work chimes with themes that have been threading through the Spring shows in general. As Freddie Mercury’s voice sang his ’70s Queen hits loudly and clearly on the soundtrack, it was mood-uplifting to watch Watanabe play with the processes of patternmaking and work in progress. Watanabe has a lifetime of cutting skills in his back pocket. He has often synthesized his admiration for Dior’s New Look and Madeleine Vionnet’s bias cut into his shapes, punk-ing them up as he goes. This time, he treated ’50s circle skirts, tulle petticoats, and ball gowns to half-and-half effects. What looked frontally like dance skirts turned out to be attached to regular jeans at the back. Other times, the dresses or lingerie slips were vertically split and sewn onto denim overalls and white T-shirts. At other times, he just allowed himself to patchwork his much-loved fishtail bias-cut dresses in denim.
This much we know about Watanabe: Whatever he shows on the runway will always be backed up by further highly wearable variations on the theme once the clothes arrive in store. A classic Watanabe season to relish is clearly coming up. The resonances with others, though? The mood for reevaluating couture processes and fantasies of lost elegance has, so far, been documented at Maison Margiela (check out its latest menswear, particularly), in Francesco Rizzo’s Marni collection, and from the London designers Matty Bovan and Richard Quinn. Watanabe joins that merry band of reconstructionists. There may be more on the way.
