Junya Watanabe
Undoubtedly the most sensitive interpreter of the cyber and metropolitan spirit intrinsic to contemporary urban cultures, Junya Watanabe, a long-time collaborator of Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons and now a major star on the international fashion scene, amazes with his inexhaustible ability to transform the materials that compose and describe today's industrial landscapes into inspiration for entire collections.
Steel wires, small brass hardware, plexiglass plates, and industrial-use fabrics, repeatedly reworked and translated into sculptural masterpieces to be worn, are traces of an era decoded according to a complex intellectual project, rather than ephemeral products of a mass business.
At a glance, the colors, shapes, and fabrics reveal military equipment as the inspiration for the current season, but the context is a pure expedient for the development of a much bolder system of dualisms built around the antithetical male-female pairing. While camouflage green, heavy cottons, or denim cite virility in its most radical manifestation, seams, folds, pleats, and unexpected overlays weld silhouettes of extreme femininity.
Stylized bombers and parkas, metaphors for battles never fought, are revolutionized into poetic shrugs or practical, warm raincoats, softened by tulle and stretch wool skirts. And further, sober and austere uniforms, converted into long coats with slender bodices and wide, circular hems, or into structured capes of heavy wool. Thus, the clothes, derived from makeshift parachutes gathered at random and reassembled with skillful, draped seams, consciously shape a feminine form that, undeterred, asserts itself and systematically tames its opposite.
