Has Junya Watanabe exhausted patchworks and denim, two key codes of his brand?
Hardly.
His terrific spring menswear show explored the myriad possibilities of black, blue and white denim, and served up compelling options for going to a heavy metal concert, delivering the milk, hitting a black-tie gala — or standing out from the crowd on prom night.
Watanabe rolled out a triangular red carpet for his runway, foreshadowing his extensive exploration of the alternative tuxedo. He opted for classic wing-tip shirts and bowties as a base, but then added serious funk to his jackets via intense patchworks of fancier fabrics, including rectangles of sequins, dabs of slick leather and bullion embroideries.
If in the past Watanabe’s patchworks on workwear made you think of Field & Stream magazine, here the fine tailoring read more Town & Country, though it was worn in an offhand way. Models with lots of swagger resembled ’80s glam rockers with their shaggy or spiky hair, narrow sunglasses, flaring pants and two-tone Tricker dress shoes.
Recent Watanabe collections have skewed more experimental, and here he splayed jean-jacket parts onto woolen capes or a black jersey cardigan, or sewed three together to create a flaring, avant-garde silhouette. In a similar vein, vintage concert T-shirts (Scorpions, AC/DC and Black Sabbath) were spliced with scarves bearing prints by Cactus Plant Flea Market.
But mostly he served up straightforward jackets and pants in an array of flattering cuts, plus a host of terrific white dress shirts fronted with black bibs, grids of origami folds, or yet more patchworks of fancy black fabrics.
The low-key designer recently began welcoming journalists backstage, and on Friday he gamely fielded questions about the source material, which included vintage denim, and oddball sequencing of the show, the tuxedos arriving first and the casual white denim last.
“It’s not that I love tuxedos, but it’s nice to make denim into something really dressy, like a tuxedo,” he said. “I wanted to do formalwear.”