“Same as it ever was...”
Junya Watanabe has a cheering, practical sense of humor about owning the fact that his menswear collection is what it is, more or less on repeat. That line from the Talking Heads’s “Once In a Lifetime” seemed to hang over his show like a knowing aural wink to his fans.
Yet embedded in the down-to-earth, anti-fashiony masculinity of Watanabe’s label is a bloke-to-bloke fellowship of collecting objects with some sort of authentic provenance. Each seasonal set of releases is effectively an intricate construct of ‘authentic’ souvenir collaborations with brands and artists. This one, very obviously, was a patchwork of Pop Americana—a long list of familiar licensed graphic “quotes” from the estates of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jean Michel Basquiat, and Keith Haring, and the logos of Coca-Cola, Honda, and Netflix.
Watanabe’s cheerfully practical wardrobe for the everyday everyman doesn’t have to shape-shift every season. Why would fans want it to, when the cut and feel of his cool blazers, shirts, jeans, and parkas have reached the point of being a trusted ideal? He squares that circle with the added collector-geek attraction of all the many and storied specialist branded utility garment and accessory manufacturers he works with season after season.
Lifting the bonnet of his collection, those in-the-know will admire the complexities of Watanabe’s co-engineering with the likes of Carhartt, Levi’s, Karrimor, Il Bistonte, New Balance, and more. All this, as Watanabe spelled out on his invitation, holds the virtue of “something real, something that has history, that has traditional shape. Our kind of originality.”
