Jun Takahashi’s Undercover collection – which celebrated 35 years of the Japanese brand’s business – didn’t pretend to know it all about contemporary women, but it did deliver a substantial offering with a pinch of dream. The casting featured a number of mature women as well as industry professionals, like Lolita Jacobs. They all looked completely at ease in Takahashi’s romantic layers made out of richly-embellished cashmere knits, vintage-y jackets decorated with talismans and sparkly-hemmed coats. The poignant romanticism combined with inimitable sense of chic made Jun’s creative effort look – and feel – outstanding. For me, personally, this collection is up, up in this season’s list of top moments (and there really weren’t that many).
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So far, Undercover‘s Jun Takahashi has presented the best collection of this menswear season. I still can’t believe in its beauty, a delightful balance of refinement, fluidness and tactility. The designer was thinking about the concept of “borderlessness“. “There are many categories, many tribes. I wanted to make it borderless. Because to eliminate conflicts, you want borders to be eliminated – that’s the metaphor. And because I work in fashion, this is how I can express that.” Human unity at a moment of fracture – a theme that isn’t easy to capture through the medium of clothes, but Takahashi did just wonderfully. In the opening section the designer seemed to consider the artist’s uniform, showing a series of loose linen jackets and high-hemmed pants in sky-blue, pink, or off-white. Straps were suspended from the jacket skirts, and the elbows, vents, and other points of physical articulation were bordered by zippers or slits. Some of the garments were printed with images of clouds or smoke. The closing section featured prints of Takahashi’s painted art whose subjects included a looming sphere-headed, many-tentacled entity, and which the designer called “my creature.” On their heads, the models wore either wide-brimmed hats with fishnet veils or headpieces of golden nails or leaves above lace masks across their eyes. Most wore ornate beaded collars at their necks and intriguing little details including brightly colored painted buttons. Later on there was a phenomenal ragged-edged skirt in what looked like an old baroque brocade. Full-length robes and trailing, metal-flecked sari-esque trains and skirts came at the end. “He wanted to provide a men’s collection which also has elements that are feminine,” reported Takahashi’s translator: “because he thinks this border is getting less and less.”
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Jun Takahashi presented an immensely beautiful and important collection. The Undercover designer explained he was thinking about everyday life – the preciousness of the commonplace and the value of ritual. “Perfect Days“, a new film from Wim Wenders (highly recommend watching it on a day when nothing seems to make sense!) about a Tokyo toilet cleaner named Hirayama who’s remarkably sanguine about life – finding beauty in his books, the tapes he plays on his commute, and the photos he takes of trees in parks – was a creative stimulus for Takahashi. So moved by the film, he asked Wenders to write and read a poem for his soundtrack about a woman not unlike Hirayama in her approach to life. “Watching a Working Woman” illustrates a picture of a single mother, 40-years-old, with a job in a law firm, and a young son she likes to go to the movies with. After she puts him to bed, she writes letters and reads books. What made it so resonant and affecting was its relatability; this wasn’t a fashion designer concocting some “real“, yet absolutely fantasy woman, with an improbable wardrobe to match, but rather someone actually… real. The show opened with what looked like a white tank top and a pair of jeans; in fact, it was a jumpsuit with ribbed knit spliced into the pants’ side seams that matched the sweater the model carried in her hand. To follow, there were many more reworkings of “everyday” garments – like a cardigan, a gray marl sweatshirt, and more formal tailoring – to which he bonded swatches of excess fabric (wispy chiffon, metallic tinsel, a shaggy mohair), rendering them anything but ordinary or prosaic. Pure poetry. Make sure to take a look at the bags, made in collaboration with Brigitte Tanaka: haute-crafted grocery shoppers and yoga-friendly totes. Obsessed.
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Jun Takahashi delivered a zsa zsa zsu – what Carrie Bradshaw calls the feeling of butterflies-in-your-stomach – moment this season. Literally. For Undercover’s finale, three models materialized out of the darkness wearing strapless dresses whose skirts seemed to light up. From a distance they looked like movie projections, but as they approached it became clear the skirts were glowing from within. Moving closer still, you saw the colorful flowers and… butterflies. Terrarium dresses are a new level of ingenious, a technical feat as well as an emotionally resonant one. Through an interpreter backstage, Takahashi shared that he was grieving for people he was close to. “He feels like he’s stuck in the world, but he wants to release himself.” The butterflies, the interpreter made sure to add, “will be freed, of course.”
Reckoning with mortality is an undercurrent of Takahashi’s shows lately. It’s said that grief doesn’t end, it only changes. That it can produce powerful work was proved today. This was Takahashi at his most focused: the leitmotif that carried from the first suit to the final terrarium dress was transparent veiling or shrouding. To start, he showed neat tailoring, the sheer materials exposing the inner construction and the items he slipped between the front and back sides, like playing cards, straight razors, and silk flowers. On a camel trench the outer layer encased a set of feathered wings. Later on came more formal suits, not see-through but swathed in more black georgette. They were as elegant as any tailoring anywhere this season, but Takahashi isn’t someone who seems to look around at what his peers are doing; for one thing, he’s too busy. Three of the looks here reproduced portraits from his first-ever oil painting exhibition, “They See More Than You Can See,” held in Tokyo earlier this month. Like the figures on his canvases, the faces on the deeply ruffled skirts had their eyes deleted, or disappeared, an eerie effect that was echoed in the other figurative pieces, which reproduced the surreally beautiful paintings of the German artist Neo Rauch. At his art show in Tokyo, Takahashi said “painting is more personal”. But this was a deeply personal show and it was a spellbinder.
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When I saw Undercover‘s autumn-winter 2019 collection, I was literally like: “OMG. It’s an ode to Suspiria. OMG!”. Yes. Jun Takahashi really did a collection that’s in majority all about Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s cult horror, Suspiria. First, you’ve got to know I’m a mega-fan of Luca and all his films. But his Suspiria transported me to a completely different world. So I was really impressed that somebody in fashion finally went crazy for this film and did a proper collection based on it. The mood of 1970’s, Cold War-era Berlin and a world-renowned dance company controlled by powerful, elusive, sadomasochistic witches… it’s such a good source of inspiration. Not only the collection’s colour palette was completely inspired with the film. Takahashi wanted to use the film stills for prints (Guadagnino gave his permission for this – he’s a film director with an incredible sensibility for fashion) and here we are with a line-up of bomber jackets, hoodies, dresses and skirts that picture some of the most standout moments from the remake. Tilda Swinton – who played three roles in the film – and her character of Madame Blanc in a floor-sweeping, red dress appeared in two ways: as a literal print, and as skirt-pant hybrid in the same colour. I think no other designer can make a collection look so good, using just one reference and focusing so much on it. The theme doesn’t feel tired or invasive. It’s for fans, but not only – I bet any Undercover client will rush for the collection’s garments, without even watching Suspiria. You haven’t? Please do!
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