Junya Watanabe: The Fate of Clothes
The history of fashion is largely built on these languages. Clothes are defined, classified and set apart from one another. Tailoring stands in one place, sportswear in another. For many years, luxury and the everyday, high culture and popular culture, were kept apart by invisible borders. Yet sometimes a designer wonders not what a garment is, but what it could become. In that moment, the jacket is taken apart, slips from the shoulders and turns into an entirely different form. Jeans are no longer just trousers; they become the beginning of a new silhouette. The baseball cap, with chains, brooches and stones, becomes almost a jewel. A tracksuit is cut from tailoring cloth, while a classic jacket can become a sculptural object resting on sportswear.
When I walked into the hall in Paris where the show was held, I did not yet know that this thought was waiting for me. The first thing that caught my eye was not the collection, but the venue itself. High arches, crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, gilded ornament and walls bearing the weight of centuries past… Every detail stood for classical European elegance. In such an atmosphere, you inevitably expect impeccably cut suits, restrained colours and traditional tailoring. But when the lights went down, the first silhouette to enter dispelled that expectation in a single step. A Kappa-logo baseball cap on the head, a reconstructed jacket with chains hanging from the shoulders, wide-legged trousers and details carrying the codes of sportswear… From the very first look, it was clear that Junya Watanabe was not designing clothes; he was rewriting their fate.
The collection, titled Bling Bling Bling, suggests ostentation at first glance. Yet as the show unfolds, it becomes clear that “bling” here is less about jewellery than a way of thinking. Born in African American culture and spread across the world through hip-hop, this aesthetic ceases, in Watanabe’s hands, to be mere ornament and becomes a language that brings together, on the same body, cultures thought not to belong together.
Kappa, Needles, Levi’s, New Balance, Tricker’s, Luigi Borrelli… These were not merely brands he collaborated with. Each represented a different memory of menswear. Neapolitan tailoring and sportswear, American denim culture and Japanese design thinking, workwear and couture met within the same silhouette. Perhaps that is why, in this collection, I looked most of all at the caps. Baseball caps, which normally signal belonging to a sports team or a city, were here covered in chains, brooches, small crowns, coins and fake banknotes. Some had their peaks pierced by giant metal rings; on others, the words JW MAN sat in large letters. The caps were no longer accessories; they were the collection’s manifesto.
The same attitude could be felt in the tailoring. The impeccable Savile Row jacket was taken apart and turned into a sculptural structure hanging down from the shoulders. Tracksuits were cut from bouclé, Levi’s 501s were pulled out of their familiar shapes, and sneakers became objects defining the line of the shoulder. It was not only a garment’s function that changed, but its identity. Every pocket, every button, every fabric, every logo carried a new meaning. Watanabe did not erase these meanings; he layered them. Kappa and Neapolitan tailoring, hip-hop and Savile Row, MLB caps and pearl necklaces could all coexist within the same silhouette. What emerged was less a collage than an attempt to rewrite the vocabulary of menswear.
Streetwear or tailoring? Watanabe did not answer the question; he rendered the question itself void. He took a garment out of its category and placed it in another context. He did not redefine it; he reimagined it. When the show ended, the applause in the hall was not only for successful designs. It was for seeing a designer who has been building his own aesthetic universe for more than forty years still able to ask clothes new questions.
As I left the hall, what stayed with me was not the jewelled caps or the chain-wrapped jackets. A quieter but more lasting thought remained. Perhaps the true fate of clothes is written not at the moment we put them on, but at the moment they break free of their familiar meanings and become other possibilities.