Juniche Abe is by no means the only hybridist in fashionland, but he is absolutely one of the most accomplished. In these two collections (he presented both fall menswear and pre-fall women’s alongside each other in Paris) Abe continued to refine a technique that’s almost akin to creative taxidermy. He pulls apart groups of garments with different structures, fabrics, and backstories, then assembles them into beautifully mutant ensemble pieces.
“It looks very simple but it has a very complicated construction,” said Abe as we contemplated an overcoat made from four conjoined garments: to the left side a dark blue Harrington jacket under an Armani-shouldered, peak lapel gray wool double-breasted (but with only one breast), and to the right an olive MA-1 bomber under a classic trench. Despite Abe’s comment, this didn’t look very simple at all, but it did look good. His mixed-up knitwear featured up to three “broken then fixed” source garments refashioned to reveal geologically clashed continents of pattern divided by layers of fray. In women’s this extended into double-necked and triple-armed garments.
Particularly strong were old-school Brit multihued houndstooth check pieces played against the synthetic or casual: a country coat with lightning-flash embroidered ribbing under a deep green trench for men, and a double-faced, leather piped Rive Droite coat blended with a jean jacket. Abe usually shoots these collections on the streets of Tokyo, where the multidimensional mixed-up-ness plays nicely against the densely human background. This season his backdrop was a series of screenshots of mise-en-scènes all different and connected only in that they had caught the fancy of his jackdaw eye.
