Since he designed this collection, and we’re reviewing it, in the middle of the deepest, bleakest winter for years, perhaps it’s no wonder that Watanabe felt like gathering up a bunch of comforting knitwear and turning it into his seasonal essay. “Tradition Made New” was the collection title he issued. Nordic sweaters, Aran-style cables, and Fair Isle patterns were transplanted or somehow woven or fused into every piece of outerwear throughout—except when entire sweaters turned up under plain coats and jackets.
Under stripped-back COVID-secure circumstances, Watanabe’s show took place on a casting of regular models who walked along an anonymous back corridor of the designer’s work building. Absent the “real man” character-casting that has won Watanabe so much affection over the past couple of years, the focus was solely directed towards the clothes. What it lost in communicating the warm, fuzzy bro-to-bro feels of his Paris runways, it made up for in the surface complexities of successions of sweater-archetypes melding with quilted coat liners, army jackets, duffle coats, and baseball jackets. Along the way, his long-standing collaborations with Carhartt and Levi’s were also present.
Watanabe has collaged together disparate clothing components for men so often that it’s become part of the brand language, but never quite as much as this seemed. His game in menswear—making fashion jigsaws out of authentic brand materials and garment archetypes—is also typically sensitive to the zeitgeist. There have been many collections in which he’s offered a cooler version of city tailoring for an office worker; this time, it looked more like a practical wardrobe for all the errand-running and walk-taking routines of the new working-from-home reality. Well—even though the models didn’t look like it this season—it’s the same men Watanabe’s addressing. Even if there are no meetings, pitches, and conferences, no dinners or parties or planes to catch, there’s still a need for something just a bit less ordinary for what the new “going out” means—even if it’s a stroll to the corner shop or a couple of laps around the park.
