Junya Watanabe’s show played out like an haute couture presentation of old. The models proceeded at a stately pace, pausing to pose several times along the runway and flash cards to the audience explaining their looks. Of course, this was no Avenue Montaigne salon, and these were not conventional couture looks.
“Extraordinary art born from the everyday,” is how Watanabe explained himself in a statement. “By treating readymade items—objects originally intended for specific purposes—as one of the materials, I recontextualized them and explored forms that could never be achieved through conventional methods.”
It could be patent leather pumps, straw hats, cutlery, or wineglasses; big men’s shoes, deconstructed suitcases, wooden shoes, or boxing gloves. In classic Watanabe form and with stretchy black hosiery fabric as the binding agent, he magicked these mundane household items into dresses of historical proportions. There were pileups at the shoulders and swirling skirts in the manner of the many-panniered Marie Antoinette.
The last queen of France is a popular muse at the moment, with the V&A exhibition in London showcasing the lasting influence of her extravagant feminine style. Or is it because we prols are just now waking up to the oppression and would-be tyranny all around us? Either way, by the end, Watanabe had turned pugilist. The bolero jacket of the final look was fashioned from an assemblage of black leather boxing gloves, tellingly printed with the word Grit, after a Tokyo fight shop.
Hairdos caught mid–dye job and eyebrows penciled in asymmetrically added to the helter-skelter impression of dresses collaged from flesh-colored bras and frocks sewn together from multiple dresses, their wire hangers still attached. Whatever happens next, whichever way things go, we want Watanabe on our side.
